The Nether Rippers
by nimmieamee
Summary: Seven months after Ultimecia, Rinoa, Irvine, and Selphie become enmeshed in magical double-dealings in Deling City. Meanwhile Squall, Zell, and Quistis find themselves on a faintly ludicrous assignment for former headmaster Cid. As the questions pile up in both cases, the only answers seem to lie in old myths, children's stories, and their old enemy: Seifer Almasy.
1. Chapter 1

March 20th, some time after the war with Adel.

The children of the orphanage were going to have a story. And it wasn't going to be like one of those nice, boring little stories Matron always told. Her stories were always things like: What's That In The Sky, Bartz? and Yuffie Learns To Share and Celes Goes to the Theatre and Edward, This Is No Time To Sing! These stories had trite little morals, or else they conveyed basic, tedious information a baby could master. They also made you sleep well. They were always relayed in Matron's gentle, melodious, lulling voice. You knew nothing bad could happen in them. Everything was resolved right away, no loose ends. There were no monsters or dark twists or double-crosses to speak of.

They were dull stories. Matron, not having a cruel bone in her body, was a terrible storyteller. The only person who really liked her stories was Zell.

Though everyone liked Matron, so the only person to ever come out with it and tell her that her stories were bad was Seifer.

But today they would have a better story. Cid was here.

Cid was round and crinkly. And craggy-faced, not handsome at all. He wore sagging military jodhpurs that made him seem like more than a mere pencil-pusher, which was what Matron said he actually was: not much of a fighter these days. He'd never gone as far as he could have with his gunblade (which she forbade him from showing to the children of the orphanage, which made every single child despair and declare that they would die if they never got to see it, except for Zell, who wouldn't have wanted to see it anyway). These days, Cid was just a kind of secretary.

But he told the best stories. Cid could summon up horrible stories, stories that left you wide awake all night, stories that left you shouting contradictory things: stop! Don't say anymore! But also: why are you stopping? Keep going! We have to know what happens next!

Cid brought something for everyone every time he came. A camera for Matron.

"Hey, are we all gonna have to pose for a picture?" said Seifer.

"I hope not," muttered Squall, into the crook of Sis's arm. But they did have to. Matron made them.

And then a sparkly barrette for Selphie and a Deling City-made Cactus Jack in-a-box for Irvine. They agreed to share them both because Selphie really wanted the Cactus Jack, so Irvine wore the barrette rakishly behind one ear for a week, after which it was lost, and they had no choice but to share the Jack.

"Cid, you know they're just gonna break it, right?" said Seifer.

"Selphie's crazy crazy crazy," Squall agreed, but relayed this information to no living person directly, just to the colony of spiders that lived in the wall next to the fridge.

A smiling plush chocobo for Zell. It rattled and shook and buzzed and lit up the boys' room like a nightlight when its stomach was squeezed.

"Good, he needs baby toys," Seifer said dismissively.

"It even looks like Zell," Squall told the stove.

Seifer heard this and agreed. Rather vociferously and for the next fourteen years.

A genuine child's tool box for Quistis, which was the envy of the orphanage for the next month or so. It had everything – a play hammer, play nails, play saw, play wrench, play spackle that was really just a kind of play dough.

"She's gonna be so boring, Cid. Why'd you give that to her? She's just gonna use it a coupla' times and put everythin' right where it's s'posed to go in the box and then not let anybody else touch it," Seifer complained.

"We can steal the pieces 'n use them for weapons," Squall informed the window.

And that was exactly what happened.

Ellone had a doll in fancy old Dolletian dress, with pretty blonde hair, made of porcelain, with tiny tiny shoes that were be-ribboned, and her own mirror, and her own purse, and her own beautiful scarlet overcoat, and her own porcelain male companion in knight's garb, and her own old-fashioned sorceress staff for summoning eldritch creatures of Hyne from the deep to destroy her enemies.

"….," Seifer said, impressed in spite of himself. Then, after a minute. "Cid, is that even allowed t'give to a kid?"

"Sis should put it away where we won't break it," sighed Squall.

Then came time for Squall and Seifer's gifts. Cid made a big production of it; these two children were clearly his favorites. Good, sweet Matron loved and liked them all in equal measure. But Cid simply loved them equally; he _liked_ best the two that always came running (slowly trailing, in Squall's case) up to him every time he visited. They were less adoptable than the rest. Everybody knew this. Squall was an introverted slip of a thing that crept along addressing not other human beings, but more often the moon at night, or the grains of sand on the beach, or the blades of grass in the courtyard. He drifted behind Sis like he existed on some other plane, calm and quiet, voicing only one thought for every fifty he actually had, which made people nervous. It seemed unnatural. While Seifer was loud, fussy, childish even for a child, impulsive, stubborn, thoroughly nasty when he set his mind to it – a difficult kid.

But Cid adored them both.

"You won't believe what I've brought for you two…" he said, lifting up his hands excitedly. "Now, boys—"

"S'not gonna be gunblades," Squall told the floorboards presciently. "S'never gunblades."

"Right?" said Seifer.

Cid heard this exchange. He paused. He said, "…Er."

"Probably gonna be somethin' dumb like a train set," Seifer told Squall.

"Choo, choo, no thanks," Squall told the curtains.

"And then it'll just end up in Selphie's hands," Seifer complained. "Am I right, Squall?"

"Selphie's a jail," Squall said to his own shoes. "For all the toys she breaks. That we can't ever play with again."

"Um," Cid said. "It's a gift, boys. Don't you at least want a gift?"

"Not if it's not gunblades," said Seifer. "We've had this talk, Cid."

"Prison guard Irvy," Squall said glumly, still stuck on the vision of what would happen to some lame toy like a train set. "Traps all the toys in Her hands." He addressed these thoughts to the clock on the wall.

"Tell ya what," Seifer said, "Give us a story."

"Call it even," Squall offered, making the offer very clear to Cid's shins.

"I dunno about even," said Seifer, a natural at the thuggish shakedown. "Call it about… half even. You still owe us at least one gunblade."

"When did I ever promise two gunblades?" Cid said, thrown off. "You both know Matron won't let me bring even one gunblade—"

"Better be a good story," said Squall, ignoring Cid entirely and focusing instead on the fireplace poker.

"Nether rippers!" said Seifer.

"_Nether rippers_," said Squall.

When they put their minds to it, even if Seifer's mind was aimed too directly and too brutally at shaking down Cid, and Squall's aimed at all the spaces in the room that weren't Cid, they knew they could break him down, force him into telling the worst, the best, the most awful, the most wonderful story of all. _Nether Rippers_.

Unfortunately, they often set out to do this forgetting that the other children, with preferences of their own, might throw off their excellent union, their terrible alliance. Zell, in particular, was no fan of Cid's stories. He'd been standing by the door, halfway in the kitchen, halfway in the playroom, and when he heard mention of the Nether Rippers he burst into tears.

"No," he said, stamping his powerful chubby foot. "No, no, no, no, no!"

This summoned Quistis, who Seifer in particular often suspected was training herself up to be a kind of fun-sucking Guardian Force. There to back up all the babies, to give strength to the weaklings, and to destroy any prospect of happiness that the stronger children at the Orphanage might achieve.

Squall concurred, but not in so many words.

"We can't hear about the Nether Rippers again!" Quistis said imperiously. "Zell couldn't sleep for a week."

"Good," Seifer retorted.

"Makes him stronger," Squall told the kitchen table.

"Now, children…" Cid began.

Quistis's shouting brought Irvine and Selphie down on them.

"We gonna hear about the Nether Rippers again?" Selphie said, her eyes growing wide. She hopped from foot to foot. "Let's do it! No, let's not! Well. Yes! Let's do it! Only they're scary. Let's not! But let's do it anyway!"

"…don't think I wanna hear that story again," Irvine said, looking worried. "Unless Sefie wants to. Then I guess I do."

Sis trailed in, having secured her dolls in a secret place. She said, "Why don't we just read Lightning Looks For Her Sister again?"

"No!" cried every single child in the room.

Except for Zell, who had cried himself into a heap on the floor by this point. He raised his tear-streaked head hopefully and nodded. "Boxer's cool."

"That boxer in that story is stupid, with stupid ideas and a stupid face and a stupid coat," Seifer said dismissively.

Zell began crying again. Sis and Quistis began to chide Seifer. Seifer began to shout at them for being horrible fun-killing jerks. Selphie made it known that she thought everyone but Irvine was a jerk. Quistis began yelling at Selphie. Irvine began yelling at Quistis. Squall pulled up a chair at the kitchen counter and informed the counter that everyone here was very loud and also they were all horrible, every last one of them.

Matron walked in.

"What did you _do_?" she asked Cid.

Cid, standing forlorn and terrified in the center of the kitchen, shrugged. "Nether Rippers?" he said, by way of explanation.

When Matron next spoke, her voice was very low and soft, but everyone heard it anyway, even above all the noise, because when Matron spoke, you listened. It was a kind of hidden terrible power Matron had. Matron said, "No. I don't think so. That frightened most of them last time."

Everyone in the room looked relieved at this pronouncement, except for Seifer and except for Squall. Seifer stomped his foot and dislodged a loose floorboard. Squall scowled at the counter.

"We have Steiner's Big Day that we can read tonight," Matron offered.

Groans from everyone but Zell. Selphie and Irvine began to look repentant, regretting their earlier waffling about the Nether Rippers. Seifer smirked at them, superior, then remembered that his story choice had lost out, so he became angry all over again and balled his hands into fists and sat on the floor and hit one of those fists against the loose floorboard.

For Squall's part, he only told the counter, very seriously, "Would rather lose all my hearing than read Steiner's Big Day again."

Matron and Cid glanced at him, alarmed.

"There's also From Sewers to Sky Piracy," said Matron.

At this, even Quistis became regretful. That one sounded like an interesting book, but it was seventeen pages of political dithering that went over their heads, with a very annoying protagonist and very little sky piracy to speak of. Quistis thought the moral was that war was bad? Or something? But even she wasn't really sure.

"Even the sky pirate in that book thinks he's too cool for it," Squall muttered.

"Can't blame him," said Seifer.

Cid took in the sea of regretful and put-upon faces (and Zell, still sniffling into the floor). He glanced at his beautiful wife, who was tapping her foot in annoyance at him. He looked down at his bag, where one brand new deluxe train set sat forlorn and unwanted. He said, "Tell you what? I have an idea. I'll tell you a whole new story!"

Immediately, the children became transfixed. Seifer stopped pounding. Zell stopped crying. Selphie stopped tangling her barrette in Irvine's hair and just let it dangle limply behind his ear.

"I don't know that—" Matron began.

"You have to make dinner anyway," Cid said. "And you deserve some time off from these rascally little gangsters!"

"I'm not a—" Quistis said.

"You are," said Seifer.

"Y'kinda are," sniffed faithless Zell.

"She so is," Squall told the counter.

"We all are," Ellone said fairly, settling the whole thing. "We're orphanage gangsters."

"Who are going to straighten up! Live right! Go bathe themselves!" Cid said, realizing that this was his moment to take command of the whole unruly lot. He injected military precision into his voice. All of the children straightened up right away, even Seifer. "Ellone! You're the boss. See that they do it well! You're squad leader! Seifer, B-for-Boy Team command. Then both squads reconvene at the boys' nursery. Nineteen hundred on the dot!"

"Yes, sir!" said Irvine, impressed in spite of himself.

"Then," Cid said mysteriously, "We tell the story of…"

"Just make sure it's not—" Edea began.

"The Duchy of Lost Children!" Cid boomed.

"I was afraid you were going to say that," said Edea.

She could not have made the story sound more promising, more intoxicating, if she'd tried.

"I have Tidus Plays Blitzball," she said, making a last-ditch effort to save the children from Cid's storytelling.

"No!" cried every last child, even Zell. Even Zell hated that one. And even Zell was interested in the new story, if also fearful of what a Duchy of Lost Children might mean for his good night's sleep. Still, he submitted himself to Seifer's bossy manhandling in the boys' bathroom with much less crying than usual.

At nineteen hundred on the dot they assembled to hear the story. Matron had filled the house with the smell of homey, boring old chicken-cactuar soup. This did nothing to quell the excitement spreading among the children. Cid was already in his arm chair when they reconvened. He was still a short, gentle, ugly little man, but he'd somehow made himself seem mysterious and horrible and powerful.

He lifted a finger and said, "This is a story of Hyne."

The children glanced among themselves, confused. Was this a religious story? Had Cid tricked them into a lesson? Many began to look mutinous at the thought. Cid picked up on it and lifted his hands out placatingly.

"This has no moral!" he assured them. "That's why they never tell this one. No moral at all. No use to tell in church or at school.

"Now. People believe that the ground beneath us is a dead thing. But Hyne knew better," Cid said. "Hyne was born from the earth, from a marriage of wild moon monsters when they hit the earth's surface and the orderly rays of the sun, that gave those monsters thought and magic. They moved about the earth and died there, and their magical bones became embedded deep beneath the ground and attained new life, and this became Hyne. Born out of the cauldron of the earth. Out of the—"

"Netherworld," whispered Seifer. "Where the Nether Rippers are."

"Shhhh," said the others.

"No, no," said Cid, "Well, yes. But this is a different story. A different take on the Netherworld. Or let us call it Underworld. People say the Underworld is just home to dirt and worms, but it is not. It is the heart of our planet. Just as in the heart we have secret thoughts and desires and terrors, so too in the Underworld are packed valuable jewels and metals and teeming lava full of life, and also horrible beasts to beat us back from these things. The Underworld is the great lump deep inside that pumps to keep the earth alive, a land where magic sunlight was buried within the strong moon monster bones, and where the sunlight and bones became lava. Lava lets itself escape, now and then, bubbling up in volcanoes, releasing, bleeding out onto the surface through the capillaries at the tops of the Trabia mountains. This was how Hyne came to be. He was bones that were melted into one great person, the first person. And he didn't come from the sun or the moon. He came bleeding out from the center of the earth.

"The Earth had designed Hyne to be a perfectly balanced being, moon and sun, magic and strength, wild monster and orderly light. All in one. He was like all the other wonderful things the earth produces, gleaming rubies and carbuncles, emeralds and delightful diamonds, metals to makes weapons with. This is why we call him God. Because he was greater than the things he found on the surface. First, he found actual sunlight, which blinded him initially and gave him a headache. Sunlight in its strongest form, not melted down and contained as it is in the ground, but simply pounding away at you, is a horrible, conquering thing. It leaves you aching and thirsty. It did this to Hyne. So Hyne split the earth with a metal blade, and up bubbled the secret hidden springs underneath the world, making the oceans and rivers for him to drink.

"Next Hyne had to contend with the moon monsters. These are magical beings called down to the world by some unknown force. They still plague us today. Though they were Hyne's cousins, they were capable only of savage, impulsive thoughts. They had not been tempered by the ground, as Hyne had been. So Hyne struck them down, and for a hundred years he battled them, until their numbers dwindled.

"We know the old myth now. Hyne became tired, and fell asleep, and to keep the monsters at bay he used the earth to make more people, companions for himself, to do his work for him while he rested. But when he woke, the people had multiplied, and they say that Hyne—"

"Burned up all the children!" Seifer crowed.

Zell gave a squeak, and buried himself in his chocobo.

Up came Cid's finger again. "That's what they _say_," Cid said. "But I've been somewhere, long ago. Long ago, I chanced to visit the horrible magic city of Esthar—"

Gasps from all the children, save Ellone, who made a face for some reason.

"And there they tell it differently," said Cid. "There, they say he did not get rid of the children at all. Hyne woke, and was surprised to see so many new people. But he did not hate them, initially. The people were like him. They had come from the ground. They were powerful and wonderful bits of life that had once been buried. Hyne had dug them up and brought them to the surface, and at first they loved him. And Hyne, too, loved them at first. For he had come of the ground, too. At one time they had all been ground, been connected. So he called the people his sisters and brothers, and believed they were all the same.

"But they were not the same. The earth will give us topazes and sapphires, tourmalines and amethysts, and all these things are very different. So too with the people. Hyne's creations were not identical to him. They had minds of their own. They made a poor army, always squabbling and expressing their own opinions, and going against the commands Hyne gave them. Some of them were honorless brigands from the start. Others, real diamonds at first, until they let themselves become cut into vagabonds, rebels. Many turned against Hyne, and many more simply did not accept his brotherhood. They preferred to be their own beings.

"This enraged Hyne. Never had he considered that he might feel as he did when the people rebuffed him. Lonely. He had always been alone, of course. But for the first time he began to be afraid, because now there were other creatures in the world who could think as he did, and yet they did not. They thought their own thoughts. All except the small ones.

"You see, the people had devised a way to make newer, smaller people. I won't tell you the details. You're too young—"

"Aw," said Irvine.

"Shhh," said everyone else.

"These were children," said Cid. "And children are very open. They find it easier to connect with others than adults do. This why we have to tell them stories, to teach them ways to think for themselves—"

"That sounds like a moral," Selphie said warningly.

"Sorry, sorry," said Cid. "But the point is: the children accepted Hyne. They still trusted him and loved him. They followed his commands, and gladly became his army. But this enraged those older beings that had turned against him. So Hyne gathered up the children and retreated to this very shore, to a great castle he built for them. And there he prepared them for battle. At first, it did not occur to Hyne to worry for their safety. He saw the children as rightfully willing to die to keep the world all connected. And in fact they were. They wanted to do just that.

"But there was one problem," Cid said. Then he stopped, put his hand to his brow. He shook his head, almost mournfully.

"What?" Seifer asked him.

"Yeah, Cid, what was it?" Quistis said.

"Tell us," Squall demanded of his quilt.

"It is very hard not to care for children," Cid said. "Children are not like monsters. They are people. And when they enter your life, if you are not careful, you will begin to love them. No one had ever warned Cid about this—"

"Cid?" said Seifer, suspicious.

"Hyne," Cid said quickly.

Seifer could ridicule you horribly if he found you going soft on him.

"I mean Hyne. No one had ever warned Hyne. So he began to love the children, and when he looked over his battlements and saw the rest of the people turning the metals of the earth into swords, pikes, weapons, he realized how awful it was to sacrifice them. So he didn't."

"What?" said Seifer.

"He didn't," Cid said. "Hyne was magic incarnate, remember? Moon magic and sun strength. Or was that sun magic and moon strength? Either way, he had more power than the people suspected. And when they went to retrieve their children, with blades and maces, Hyne did the best thing he could do for his beloved army. He sunk his duchy, his castle, and all the children in it, deep within the life-giving earth."

"He buried them?" Quistis said, horrified.

"He saved them," Cid said, "Or so he thought. He believed he was sending them to a time and place where they would always be safe, always be connected to him. Back beneath the harsh, chaotic world. To the heart of things."

There was silence.

"This," Cid finished, "Is what we call the Duchy of Lost Children. All people are descended from the beings who turned against Hyne. But our cousins, the loyal ones, Hyne sunk beneath the earth. The Underworld took them back in. Swallowed them up again."

Zell began to cry.

"C'mon," Seifer said, unimpressed. "That's not so bad."

"He _buried_ them," said Ellone.

"No wonder people ended up rippin' off his skin," put in Selphie.

"He wasn't bad, though," Squall told Zell's chocobo. "_He_ thought he wasn't."

This became a point of contention. To Irvine, Selphie, Quistis, Zell, and Ellone, it was clear that Hyne was bad. Unforgivably so. To love children and line them up into an army did not sound like real love at all. Besides, Hyne's flesh, the part of him left after his strong skin had been surrendered to humanity, the magic part - that had turned into sorceresses. And sorceresses were bad. Everyone knew that.

"They're not so bad," Seifer protested.

Seifer had recently watched a movie with a very beautiful and sympathetic sorceress in it, and been very affected by the whole experience.

"They're not," said Squall.

Squall hadn't liked the movie as much. It had made Sis sad. It was just that Squall sometimes suspected that Matron was a sorceress, and this was solid proof that sorceresses could be good.

She was, and they could be.

She chose this moment to walk in. Everyone was fighting. Or, well. Everyone was fighting with Seifer, sole Defender of Hyne (for his part, he thought sinking into an adventure beneath the earth wouldn't be so bad anyway. It was better than being burned up). Only Squall was not fighting with Seifer. He was simply occasionally corroborating Seifer's points, and addressing this corroboration to a mountain of pillows.

"_Cid_," Edea said, exasperated.

"This is good," Cid said defensively. "They're thinking for themselves."

Edea shot him a frustrated look.

She managed to quiet the children and shuffle them back into the kitchen for dinner. How? Special sorceress powers, no doubt. No ordinary human woman could have calmed down even just Seifer, let alone the whole orphanage gang, when they got going.

"Come on," she said, "All of you! It's your favorite soup tonight, and then rest."

Whining from the children.

"Hush, hush," Edea said. "No complaints. Every body needs rest." Then, to Cid, in an undertone, "Even if every time a certain someone visits, he looses the Alps on them and I spend the night warding off bad dreams."

Cid hung his head. He followed the first troop to the kitchen. Seifer and Squall were last out of the room.

"I wouldn't mind goin' down into the earth," Seifer insisted stubbornly.

"S'Nether Rippers down there," Squall told him, the first time Squall had directly addressed anyone since this morning, when he'd informed Sis that he thought most people were a headache and she was the only exception.

"So what?" Seifer said. "You scared of Nether Rippers?"

"You're scared," Squall shot back.

"I'd kill 'em with my gunblade," Seifer said.

"Run 'em through," said Squall.

"Crunch up their bones," said Seifer, with satisfaction. "Bet I could kill more than you."

"No way," Squall scoffed.

"Way," said Seifer. "Bet you couldn' kill a Nether Ripper if it stole yer girlfriend and tore up yer house and killed yer mom and spit in yer face."

Squall eyed him balefully. "Could too."

"Yer _on_, then."

"_Boys_," Matron said warningly.

* * *

Years later.

It was March 20th again, only this time it fell seven months after the Ultimecia War. That war had reduced far-off Northern Trabia to rubble. But no longer. They'd had seven months to work at the place, and so Trabia was beginning to struggle past the status of 'burned-out, depressing shantytown.'

This was nice.

It was also largely due to the efforts of the woman who'd bombed the place to smithereens, though, and that was less nice. From the local Trabian perspective.

Kind Edea had gone haywire, wrong. And, ultimately, gone powerless. And hated. The local Trabians did not want her here. They called her a witch. She wasn't, not anymore.

But this made very little difference to the locals. There was no way to spin the story that didn't lay some of the blame on her. Cid had tried. But the truth was, there was no point. She and Cid were no longer a united force, a marriage of sensible kindness and exciting and foolish romance. Edea had moved beyond him too many times, gone to where homely, small Cid Kramer could not follow. She'd gone and become possessed without him. And recruited knights for Ultimecia without him. And murdered presidents without him. And blown up Trabia Garden, and so on.

Their relationship wasn't in the best place right now.

He still adored her, of course. But it was uneven adoration. She found, horribly, suddenly, that she couldn't quite reciprocate it anymore. Not to the same extent.

She looked over an old picture of him once she was alone in her hotel room. Not just a picture of him. A picture of all of them, taken with the camera that he'd given her. Left to right: Cid and Seifer, Quistis and Zell, Selphie and Irvine, Herself, Ellone and Squall. Cid was holding Seifer. Seifer looked annoyed, but had submitted to it with all the grace that his rough four-year-old self had been able to muster.

Edea felt a powerful sense of guilt slide over her. She covered up that side of the picture with one long-fingered white hand. This left Quistis and Zell.

Quistis! So beautiful, and kind to the others, and good. An essentially good person. Always Edea's lieutenant, back then. Always willing to look out for the weaker ones. She'd been adopted early, for being so beautiful and so good. But her adoptive parents had not been very nice. They'd just been available and looking to buy a beautiful child. Edea had gone with it at the time. She'd believed, somewhat foolishly, that a child like Quistis could make a home anywhere.

And she'd had bigger things to worry about then than Quistis's home life.

She stretched a finger over that side of the photo.

Next came Selphie and Irvine. One whose new home she'd destroyed. Another who'd been left remembering the orphanage for years, but with no way to get in contact. He'd tried, and Edea had instructed Martine to gently rebuff him, because she'd assumed this would be safer for Irvine in the long run. It hadn't been.

Edea shifted her palm this time, covering up one, two, three, four, five, six faces.

Next was herself. She covered that one, too.

Then came Ellone, isolated and miserable for years, trapped with the White SeeDs. There the guilt was definitely too much.

The only one left was Squall. And he was doing well. So well. Edea felt her heart swell at the thought. True, she'd done less than she would have liked to bring about his success. But neither had she contributed to his unhappiness. She could say, honestly, that she'd done right by him. Squall would now go down in history, eternal, forever a mark of true courage in battle.

Well. That was nice.

Wasn't it?

And that was the last thought Edea had before someone tapped her shoulder. She whirled around.

"Oh," she said. "Oh, you came after all. I wanted to talk to you. I… I learned a lesson, after all this. And I wanted to say—"

The blade pierced her just above her shoulder. Her vision went black.

* * *

"Oh, look, Squall," Rinoa said. "My friends from school!"

It was a week earlier – March 13th. Friday the 13th, and Squall Leonhart was not a big believer in the superstitious, but he ought to have been, because it was clearly not going to be his day.

They were in Gryphon House, a landmarked mansion in Deling City that also housed Rinoa's old school library. Squall had never been much of a reader, aside from the required Garden training manuals and Weapons Monthly and the like, but Rinoa inhaled books like they might crumble into dust before her very eyes, so here they were. She was here for two in particular: Cloncio Achilleviam's very rare The Duke, a Dolletian renaissance-era political tract that had landed its author in prison for most of his life. And How To Keep From Making Enemies While Still Successfully Manipulating People, a bestseller among the Galbadian elite.

Also basically anything on sorceresses from the Galbadian continent. Literally anything. She'd worked her way through Esthar's resources in an alarmingly short time, but it seemed that where a sorceress grew up could influence how their powers developed. Rinoa was (regrettably, to her mind) Galbadian by birth and breeding. And so it only made sense to come to Galbadia, even if most of the really useful books here had doubtlessly been burned or consigned to Vinzer Deling's private library.

Rinoa was a sorceress, a politically-minded one if not a very good one. She hadn't been one long enough to be a very good one. She only knew a handful of spells. She had to teach herself, because every sorceress was different enough that even someone who'd been a sorceress for a very long period, like Edea, couldn't often explain how Hyne's power would manifest in another person. The first really worthwhile spell Rinoa had inadvertently learned was invisibility, three months into the whole sorceress thing. But she couldn't extend it to other people, so she didn't use it often. She stuck by her friends, and wouldn't have left them standing around in a lurch, staring at the empty space where she'd stood moments before. That would have been a nice sorceress trick, she always said. But it wasn't a very nice person trick.

Invisibility becoming her first perfected (okay, nearly perfected) spell probably said something about her. Namely, that she was perhaps not enjoying life as a well-known sorceress. And it definitely said something about how unfair the universe was that the way the spell worked, for Rinoa, sometimes involved her erupting into a brilliant display of white feathers before vanishing. For absolutely no reason. The feathers didn't do anything. They were just needlessly flashy. This was the other reason she didn't use the spell very often.

Four months in she'd learned some basic telekinesis, which she still couldn't quite control. It was more of a hindrance than anything else. Sometimes she levitated her dog, who seemed to enjoy it. That was the only perk.

Then came full mastery of flight, a natural extension of her telekinetic abilities. Rinoa had almost been lost in the far reaches of space this one time, so she didn't actually like this either. She worried irrationally that she'd float up and never come back down again.

After that she realized she could sense magic used anywhere within a few hundred meters of her location. That was the slightly uncomfortable headache she always seemed to have when in B-Garden; she just hadn't realized it was anything but a headache while at B-Garden, because almost everyone there was using GF magic all the time. But when she'd come back to Deling, on magic lockdown thanks to Sorceress Edea's takeover, any soldier's Scan and Cure and Fira hit her with sudden discomfort. Someone was casting in the depths of the library right now, probably illegally for all she knew, and it gave her what felt like a soft, irregular tap-tap-tap across the front of her skull. Not painful. Just sudden, off-putting, and unpleasant.

And that wasn't the oddest side effect.

One morning, two months ago, she'd woken up speaking and writing flawlessly in some unknown language, possible Middle Trabian, or else a very early variant on Estharian. Maybe even pre-Ancient Centran, which was crazy, because she hadn't even known there was a _pre_ that had come before the Ancient Centrans. She managed to infect some of their friends with it. They stood around babbling in Ancient Centran until it wore off. That had been interesting. But mostly, to Rinoa's mind, annoying. She'd never been so embarrassed in her life.

And yet it wasn't by far the worst manifestation of her powers. She could also mute people. Permanently. Or at least until she decided to take it off. No echo screens, remedies, elixirs, esunas, or treatments made a difference; it all came down to Rinoa's will. That scared her, and so all their friends pretended it didn't really scare them, but it obviously did. Only Squall was unfazed. He usually was, when it came to Rinoa. He'd sworn he'd never be afraid of her, a personal challenge, and as far as everyone could tell he seemed to be meeting it.

This was Squall. He never backed down from a challenge.

Rinoa, too, thought Squall would go down in history. If only because of sheer stubbornness. It was not in Squall's nature to give up. Tenacity was his number one quality. People thought it was silence, or a propensity for stunning victory, or else courtly knighthood and inner nobility. But his tendency toward silence – his girlfriend was discovering – was simply a byproduct of a stunningly lonely childhood full of abandonment. And victory had to do with fate and the alignment of the planets and hard work and friends. And his inner nobility was, to be honest, something people just liked to imagine about him. He didn't concern himself with it very much. He told her very often that people were essentially morons.

Tenacity, though.

Only once in his life had Squall ever given up. On people, that is. On humanity. On any kind of human connection. He'd effectively sealed off any kind of interest in others, or desire for their wellbeing, and he'd done this stubbornly, thoroughly, _perfectly_. He did nothing imperfectly. It wasn't that he was a perfectionist; it was just that he tended to be better at nearly everything than almost anyone else, to an extent that almost made Rinoa jealous.

But he'd still given up. And he was in some way ashamed of it now, though the shame was rooted in his unconscious mind, Rinoa thought, because she could feel enough of her knight's emotions to know that he carried that shame with him even as he never admitted it to her. Possibly the strange mechanisms of Squall's overactive, tenacious brain kept it buried deep, motivating him without his knowledge.

He would not give up again. Giving up was not in his character.

Even if sometimes, like right now, he clearly sorely wanted to.

"Your friends all hang out in their old school library?" Squall said.

"That is a little weird," Rinoa allowed.

She called out to her friends. They called back. The general noise they produced left Squall blinking in distaste.

Rinoa moved to greet them, but Squall did not, and since her hand was on Squall's arm, she mostly moved half a foot in their direction and then stopped, realizing that the person she was holding had suddenly taken on the implacable qualities of one of the library's many decorative statues.

"How many of them are there?" Squall forced out, after a minute.

"Looks like all nine in my old class," Rinoa said. She said this primly. She felt like she ought to consider apologizing to him for having so many unexpected friends. But she was thoroughly convinced that she should not _have_ to apologize for having friends.

"Nine!"

"No, look. There's Missy from class B, with that red book. Ten, I guess."

Grimly: "Ten."

"That's nothing. There are about a fifty students in the whole school at a time. That's a whole fifteenth of the Garden population. Or something like that. So many people, huh? So many."

Squall glared at her. He suspected she was having fun with him. She was.

"You should come greet them with me," Rinoa said. "You don't think it's too much for you, do you Squall?"

She didn't make it sound like a challenge. Much.

"I can do this," Squall said.

He could, too. She believed in him.

Plus, she suspected that after it was over he'd call in to _his_ friends (all four of them, which was the number of friends Squall generally assumed a sensible person had) to complain bitterly about the whole thing.

* * *

While Squall was so struggling, someone – not a particular friend of Squall's, since the list of Squall's friends was fairly short, and this person wouldn't have been interested in being listed on it anyway – raised a mud-splattered hand at the rear door of the orphanage, and knocked.

It was a pale hand, underneath all the mud. Long-fingered, as though designed for greater things than mere knocking, but also calloused, a fighter's hand.

"…_Cid_," the person choked out.

Cid did not live at the orphanage, not formally. He was now living nearby, enjoying his retirement. But he was not at his official new residence, and neither was his wife, the witch (not that this person wanted to encounter the witch), and so it became necessary to seek him out in the environs.

It must have been a truly terrible necessity. Cid's guest was clearly in no condition to go wandering around Centra. Besides their general griminess, which obscured their pale hair and made it hang limp, greasy, and filthy, in fact they looked as though the ground itself had swallowed them whole and spit them back out again. Mud-encrusted boots, mud-encrusted pants, mud on their long, battered coat. Mud in their wounds, which dripped a trail of blood to the orphanage door.

"…_CID!_" they tried again.

This was clearly a very unlucky person. But perhaps the stars had aligned for them, for once. Cid was inside the orphanage, and heard the second shout. He went, gingerly, to the door, and opened it a crack, and then opened it wider when he saw who it was.

"…Cid," said this person, falling into him. He was barely able to catch them in time. "Crater… In Kash…"

They coughed violently, hacking up blood or earth or both. It stained the front of Cid's shirt. Kind, ugly Cid could not bring himself to care.

"In… Ruins…" this person said mournfully. "In…the…desert…."

"Tell me," Cid said urgently, putting their face between his hands.

"_Cid_…" they said. "He…"

"Easy now," Cid said gently.

"He said…to…tell you…

"_Nether Rippers_."


	2. Chapter 2

Later that day, Squall did call his four friends. This was a big new thing for him: reaching out to people. So Zell, the one who'd taken the call, felt they had to be sympathetic.

"Rinoa has friends," Zell said. He nodded at Squall's image on his fancy new Estharian vidphone, and crossed his arms like he disapproved of Rinoa having friends.

"Duh," Selphie said.

She took a sip of her milkshake and waved at some passing Estharians. She didn't know them. And they probably didn't recognize her; she was traveling incognito. But then maybe she did and maybe they did. She liked to get to know everyone, and everyone invariably got to know her.

"Everybody has friends," she continued. "Honestly."

Zell and Irvine shared a look. After a second, they brought Squall's grim phone face into the loop. It became a series of three-way looks. Quistis noticed them doing it and invited herself in. Four identical looks. Of disbelief.

Everyone did not have friends. Selphie had friends. Selphie managed to make friends with everyone.

"I mean, imagine not having friends," Selphie mused, oblivious to the circle of looks around her.

Selphie made, on average, six new friends every morning. Often they were people. But sometimes they were puppies or moombas or malboros. It was hard not to be Selphie's friend. And probably better for your general health, in the long run. You didn't want to be Selphie's enemy.

Now, on the other hand: Irvine. Fairly easygoing. Not going to give you a hard time even if he didn't like you. But Irvine had made only six friends in his whole life, way back when he'd been a kid at the orphanage. And then they'd all forgotten about him.

Quistis did not have many friends. She had groupies. They were not the same thing. They tended to steal her possessions. Rig up cameras in the training center shower when they thought she might be in there. Collect around her at lunch and gaze at her creepily. Disregard her express wishes regarding her private life, inviting people she hadn't seen in years to drop by without informing her first, just because these strangers from her past might reveal some marvelous Quistis Trepe secret that the Trepies felt was rightfully theirs.

When, to be honest, her biggest secret was that she secretly hated Trepies. The Trepies were not her friends.

Zell, by contrast, sometimes wanted very much to make friends even with people whom he ought to have hated. Friendliness was a part of his nature. As were extreme hyperactivity, a tendency towards defensiveness, a sense of righteousness that sometimes overrode social cues, the odd moment of perceptiveness that often left people off-balance and looking to strike back, and a pale face that flushed wonderfully red when teased. Zell did not collect friends. He collected bullies, and also people rolling their eyes at him. A lot.

Squall was simply not very friendly. Before making these four friends, he hadn't had any to speak of. The closest he'd had was Seifer, his rival. Squall regarded Seifer on some level as a manifestation of his own need to challenge himself, possibly even a very frustrating part of Squall's darkest mind that had sprung up and taken human form. This had enabled Squall to welcome the challenge – the closest thing he had to a friend. Not as someone he was particularly certain existed independently from him or had any kind of valuable inner life. Just as a being who echoed Squall in enough ways and challenged him just enough to register as vaguely existing somewhere out there in the ether, where Squall ended and the thoroughly bothersome universe of other people began.

The people who wrote worshipful articles about Squall in the newspapers, in places like Timber and Winhill, would never have been able to understand this. They believed that Squall had to be, deep down, a friendly person: able to see the essential humanity in others, consumed by romantic passion and deep feeling, essentially loving and charitable and sociable.

Squall assumed these people were idiots when he bothered to think about them. But usually he didn't bother to think about them, because he had four friends and a girlfriend to occupy himself with, and they were a lot of work already in his opinion. They not only existed – they lived. Independent from him. Capable of leaving at any second. The whole business was very messy, very difficult. Particularly since he took to friendship like he took to everything else, with a sort of dour stubbornness, making a heroic and arduous task out of it.

He could not understand Rinoa having so many friends. It had seemed to sap up a lot of energy, talking with them. Firstly, she had what seemed like a thousand or possibly ten friends; too many to take on, in any case. Like a swarm of clinging, annoying elastoids attacking all at once. Secondly, she hadn't even seemed to like them very much. She spoke with them in a bizarre code, all pointed references and childhood nicknames and inside jokes that no one seemed to laugh genuinely at. It had been entirely unlike the direct dealings that Squall had with people at Garden. Rinoa's friendships with these people were not straightforward; there were no clear rankings and no order of command. They engaged in what, to Squall, seemed like political double-speak, as bad as what any Deling City official could throw at you.

Of course, her childhood friends had been the children of high-ranking Deling City officials, so maybe that was part of it. Squall's childhood friends had been... Well. File not found. And his current friends were forthright mercenaries, like he was.

"Really," Selphie was saying. "Not having friends. How sad would you have to be—"

"Maybe you're trying!" Zell said.

"It's not your fault if you're lonely," said Irvine. "Everybody gets lonely."

"Why would you want to be friends with those people anyway?" muttered Quistis.

"Friendship seems like a lot of work with no guaranteed reward," offered Squall.

Everyone stopped to stare at the phone instead of staring at Selphie. Even Selphie stared at the phone. They expected Squall to add something along the lines of: "Oh, but obviously I'm really happy to be friends with all of you." But he didn't. He did throw in a "whatever" when he started to suspect they were all looking at him. They sometimes had unrealistic expectations for Squall.

Case in point: the next thing someone (Quistis) said was, "Oh, we were invited to the Presidential Palace for lunch, and Laguna asked after youspecifically, and—"

Squall said, "Caraway just came home. I have to go."

This was a lie. General Fury Caraway was away meeting with the Deling Interim Commissioner. He'd been home long enough to put Rinoa in a terrible mood and to order her and Squall into separate rooms. This order went entirely ignored, as he was dealing with two of the only people on the planet who refused to be intimidated by him. He'd also barked several strange father-to-potential-son-in-law observations at Squall, a sort of Rinoa care manual, composed by someone who clearly did not know Rinoa as well as he thought he did. Even if Caraway had been home, Squall wouldn't have made any kind of time for him unless absolutely necessary.

He just didn't want to have a discussion about Laguna right now.

Laguna was classified somewhere in Squall's mind as a distant relation. Squall was always very stiffly polite to him when they met up, but they rarely met up, because Squall often avoided him altogether, which – mind you – was not giving up on Laguna, because Squall had no realistic connection to Laguna, because Laguna had never bothered to discover that Squall existed in the first place. So really, if anyone had ever given up, it was Laguna.

Who was also (Squall felt it necessary for people to know) a buffoon.

Squall had weighed the pros and cons of getting to know Laguna in his mind. He could see no obvious pros.

"Okay, but Squall," Zell said. "Just listen. He needs—"

"And the connection is bad," Squall said shortly.

"The connection seems fine to me," said Selphie brightly.

"It's Deling City. All this nighttime."

"Interferes with your wireless satellite connection?" said Irvine.

Caught out. Squall could now see four challenging faces through his fancy new Estharian vidphone. Four people who he suspected wanted him to open up even more. To have a father for a friend. To have five friends. Six friends. Endless friends. On and on and on and on. Forever.

When, really, he was self-aware enough to know he didn't work like that. He had to do the opening up thing in his own way.

Squall was not opposed to friendship (at this point; quite the opposite; he saw some real benefits in human connection), but he knew his own limits, and he didn't like people pushing him, and besides this it seemed to him that when other people decided you were a friendly person, the madness never ended. Suddenly you had to be friendly all the time and to everyone. And that was no way to live.

"…Yes," Squall said. "What do you know about the Deling area?"

"I lived there for thirteen years," Irvine said.

"I know," Squall said, annoyed. "Rinoa's friends were talking about you. You have quite a reputation."

"That's a little beside the point," Irvine said.

"They called you a loose man," Squall said. "A raving bisexual lunatic horndog."

That was another lie. They had been talking about Irvine. But they hadn't used exactly those words. Squall wasn't sure what words they'd used; his instinct had been to sharply cut them down and make them stop talking about Irvine. Squall wasn't friendly, but he wasn't disloyal either, and their talk had come too close to useless gossip for him to tolerate it.

Any other person would have been delighted to eavesdrop on what people in Deling were saying about Irvine. Irvine was a notorious flirt and had trained as an assassin, so most of it was fascinating: it always involved sex and violence. As the only Ultimecia War hero to come out of Deling and not identify strongly with Timber instead of Deling City, he cut an interesting and salacious figure for the average Galbadian, never mind what the upper crust thought of him. So they hadn't said "loose" or "raving bisexual lunatic horndog," but something close to that. Squall was paraphrasing. Partly to alert Irvine to the fact that he was some kind of dirty backstreets Deling folk hero. And mostly because he wanted to get out of the conversation.

And besides: he suspected that outing Irvine as a raving bisexual lunatic horndog would surprise exactly no one in their group. And it might even leave Irvine feeling rather proud of himself.

Unfortunately, this didn't throw Irvine off. "I'm flattered and touched that they thought of me?" he said. "Still beside the point."

"And Squall," said Quistis, "Listen. You don't have to hide."

"Yeah," said Zell. "Everybody knows Laguna's your father."

He said this like it had some significance. Very very meaningfully. Zell could not do subtle, but he could do meaningful like a champ. His whole body got into it. His hands stretched out. His wide eyes widened even more. His knee tapped excitedly. He began to look like he was gearing up for the fight of his life.

Squall could only see his face through the vidphone, but he could easily envision the kind of buzzing energy he was conveying to everyone else. Zell believed things like this mattered.

But this didn't matter. The word 'friend' had only just begun to have any kind of meaning for Squall. 'Father' was going to have to wait. It wasn't that Squall had no experience with father figures. Cid Kramer had been one of the only constants in his life, guiding him at every step, building up Garden just as he built up Squall, and for the same purpose – to fight the threat of the sorceress.

Truth be told, if Squall was going to try and establish a father-son relationship with anyone, he was more inclined to try for Cid. Cid had some meaning in his life. He doubtlessly had some meaning for Cid.

Laguna, by contrast, was just a stranger.

"Give Sis my love," Squall said mildly. His face blinked out of view. The call went dead.

"I sometimes think we expect too much of him," Quistis said, after a bit.

* * *

"I wonder if I should have expected more of him," Cid told his patient.

He'd dragged his patient away from the orphanage, back to his home. There, he had potions and treatments and sorceress remedies Edea had brewed, long ago.

He hoped – prayed – that they would do the trick.

His patient didn't reply. Unconscious people rarely did.

"Don't worry," Cid said. "I've sent word to Garden. We'll sort it out. We sort out our own."

* * *

In far-off Balamb Garden, the very next day, sixteen Trepies cornered Headmistress Xu while she attempted to eat her breakfast in peace.

"Eat" was a generous word. Xu did not eat. She didn't have the time. She inhaled some coffee, glanced at a muffin, devoured half a sandwich at lunch, gorged herself on whatever was available before bed, and then repeated the process.

She was headmistress. If she stopped to eat, Balamb Garden might collapse. Or else it would revert to the state it had been in under Cid: none of the paperwork done, students running the disciplinary procedures, and possibly the creepy Shumi Guardians returning to wrench the place away from its rightful owners, the SeeDs.

Okay, Xu wasn't sure about that last one. Mostly it just happened to be a special nightmare of hers. The point was: there were far more important things to do with her time than eat.

"Xu," said the Trepies.

"Headmistress," said Xu.

"I think we all know who that position really should have gone to," said the head Trepie.

"I swear to Hyne I will revoke your club license," said Xu.

She would, too. Xu was fiercely protective of her position. She'd worked to get to it. She'd been dogged and ruthless as a SeeD cadet, but also smart. No task was too small for her, nothing beneath her attention. Every job someone gave her, she did it twice as well as expected, and with more attention to detail than it strictly required. When she'd made SeeD, she'd gladly taken on not just field duties and instructor duties but also tactical support, magic studies, card club, library club, and even secretarial work. That last one – ostensibly the dullest and most pathetic job available in Garden – had been her favorite. And also the most useful, in the end. Xu was a bang-up secretary. She knew every contact, every student, dealt with every single committee and major figure.

Not always successfully. But the dealings themselves had been the end, not so much the outcome of those dealings. Being a part of Garden, an integral part, had always been enough for Xu.

"This is an abuse of power," said another Trepie.

"Also," said the head Trepie, "You've already revoked our license. Four times."

Xu squinted at her. This was entirely possible.

"Who gave it back to you?" she said, a little dangerously.

"The Commander," said the head Trepie smugly.

Ah. Squall. Xu didn't hate Squall or anything, but sometimes she really hated Squall.

Another Garden fixture, Squall handled things very differently than she did. To his credit, he was useful in battle. And loyal, in his own way. And a very high profile face right now, the focus of a lot of media attention. But he was also moody, silent, unpredictable. He was like a Guardian Force in human form, almost. Vital to their success. But he came with drawbacks, and on top of that you had to struggle to get him under your control.

Not that this mattered right now. Squall was on vacation in Deling City, probably making out with his girlfriend (another high profile headache) under her dad's nose. While Xu was here, girlfriendless, dealing with the Trepies.

"What do you want?" Xu said to them.

"Quistis Trepe is away far too often," said the Head Trepie. "Instead of working as an instructor and aiding us with her wisdom and beauty, in her divine Hyne-given calling—"

"Wow, that's not creepy at all," said Xu.

"Consider what the latest Trepe Time Radio Hour said about her!"

Xu preferred not to. She kept tabs on what people were saying about her SeeDs as a matter of course, but it was often untrue; it usually boiled down to rumor-mongering and gossip.

"She cavorts with sorceresses! And loose men! And – well, Selphie Tilmitt's okay. But Dincht?"

Zell Dincht was, in a lot of ways, an embarrassingly awkward person, pretty much doomed to be on the bottom of the social totem pole until he hit his twenties and aged up into some kind of sexless instructor type. But he was also a good SeeD. And a hero. Going to go down in history. All that junk.

Not to mention inherently trustworthy. He could never lie. If he tried, you could see it written all over his body. Every Garden needed someone like that, some moral measure of the rest, who simply couldn't help but be honest. An upright local Balamb boy. Boring. Inappropriately aggressive in a teenage way. But principled, for the most part. Honestly, if Xu could get him to try for instructor, she could probably keep him here even if he got injured or decided it was time to retire from field work and get married or something (all SeeDs hit their expiration date one way or another; the mercenary life was a hard one). And he would come in handy. Garden, as an operation, ran on subterfuge and the occasional stunningly bold reveal; they existed mainly to drive out Galbadians or to kill people in the shadows. And when your company was that bad, you needed a few good eggs like Zell Dincht. Or the whole thing would collapse.

Seriously, good on Quistis for making friends with the guy.

"Wow, that is such a tragedy that she has friends," said Xu. "I'll get right on that. Now back off."

The Trepies would not back off. They didn't believe Xu was being sincere. They were right.

Xu took an experimental bite of her muffin to avoid having to say anything else right away. She mused it over.

She hated the Trepies with a passion. She suspected Quistis also hated the Trepies with a passion. It was hard to tell anything concrete about Quistis; Quistis was an unreal being, the Garden postergirl, an instructor barely older than her students, the top member of the card club, the face they put on all the brochures, and therefore hard to get to know as a person. But she was still a friend.

Mind, not her closest friend. Quistis and Xu had not had great beginnings; judging from her earliest memories of Quistis, Xu hadn't thought much of her way back in the day. But once they had both become SeeDs, that had faded. Quistis was very very lovely, the kind of person who brought to mind phrases like "swanlike neck," and also she was very professional, and incredibly intense. She did things like study, and train, and plan her lessons, and grade exams, and study, and train. Sometimes she found time to be better than most people at cards. But after that? Right back to being better than most people at training. And this one time, to no one's surprise, she had helped save the world, which seemed appropriate because Quistis had to have been training and studying for something.

Still, she made time to shoot the breeze with Xu. They planned lessons together, took down arrogant students. Quistis seemed to have found her niche with other people now – Zell, Selphie Tilmitt, Irvine Kinneas, Squall and Rinoa. But she had still been a good friend to Xu in her own way. And Xu had her back, when it came to the Trepies. You had to have each other's backs. Every good SeeD learned that right away.

"I am going to talk to her as soon as she gets back," Xu said, still lying through her teeth, but attempting a more serious tone this time.

"See that you do," said the head Trepie menacingly.

"Oh, I will."

"See that you do."

This was becoming circular. And a time suck. And Xu only had so much time. She tried for pensive, just to get them off her back.

"You know, now that I think about it, it is downright bizarre that she would just…"

"Yes…?" said the Head Trepie.

"Run off to Esthar," said Xu. "With friends!'

"Right?" said a Trepie in the back.

"Using her vacation hours!" said Xu.

Xu had actually begged her to use them. Photographers kept sneaking onto Garden to try and take pictures of her. It was becoming a real problem.

"It's preposterous," said a male Trepie.

"What does Quistis think this is? What kind of operation does she think I'm running?" Xu said, injecting some resentment into her tone.

Everyone expected her to be resentful of Quistis, to want to be Quistis. It was a believable lie. Unless you factored in that one time Xu had realized that being Quistis meant dealing with the Trepies, and then you realized that nope, Xu was not crazy enough to want to be Quistis.

"She thinks she's so flawless," Xu continued, "She probably thinks we owe her for saving us or something!"

This was when the conversation seemed to go haywire, as it often did when the Trepies were involved. Like most half-brained cultists, they adored and despised their idol in equal measure, and sane people could never really tell which impulse would win out in the end.

"We owe her too much to be quantified, but what does she owe us?" said the Head Trepie. The Trepies lapsed into silence to consider the question, blown away by this bit of Trepie philosophy.

"Can we ever really answer that?" Xu said. Muttering from the Trepies. Xu nodded sagely.

"Think about it," she said loftily.

They seemed to. They seemed to be thinking about it really hard. While they were engaged in using their brains (or the minuscule lumps of grey matter that stood in for Trepie brains), Xu picked up her lunch tray. She edged out of the dining hall. She went up to her office. She didn't consider this making an escape because the Garden Head didn't make escapes. The Garden Head retreated to tactically plan.

She'd been tactically planning how to get rid of the Trepies for a while. Probably better to do it when Quistis was away, right? Right. Because when Quistis was here, they got even crazier, if that was possible. Unfortunately, this might take a while, and Quistis was due back from vacation in about three days.

Xu had a file on odd happenings in Centra sitting on her desk. It had just come in today. It was from former Headmaster Cid Kramer. He'd stamped it "urgent," but everyone knew that in Cid-speak "urgent" meant "whenever the Garden Head feels like it." Xu had a deep-seated affection for Cid, who was more than he seemed at first glance. But he was also in some ways an incredibly lazy person. And she was not. So she tackled the file right away, and good thing, too. Centra would be the right place to send Quistis as soon as she got back.

"Your fans are creepy. So creepy," she told Quistis during their administrative vid meeting later in the day. "I feel like I can't just expel them—"

"Okay, but can't you?" asked Quistis hopefully.

"I'm going to call them in for psych evaluations while you're away," said Xu. "I think there's honestly something wrong with most of them. It'll take some time to get through all of the evals, but I could probably prove them nuts in time. Then I could expel them."

"Misrepresenting the evaluations to kick them out? That's unfair," put in Squall, his first contribution to the meeting.

Xu snippily told him could be assigned to Centra as well, if he was going to be like that about it, because he was long overdue for a proper mission, especially since he kept turning down all their requests from Esthar. Everybody knew all he'd be doing this weekend was making out with his girlfriend under her dad's nose anyway. He could come back early on Monday and get back to work, if he was going to be prissy.

He looked at her very grimly and said that he was the Commander.

This was to imply that Xu shouldn't be pushing him around. He didn't say it outright. It just kind of hung in the air. Squall did that a lot with the things he really wanted to say. His girlfriend was a sorceress. She had a deft touch with Squall, and tried to understand him. She treated him with care and devotion. He therefore seemed to assume that the entire world could read his thoughts using these same special sorceress mind tricks.

Even though most people in the world had neither the time nor the inclination.

Xu said, "Oh, well. I guess you'll stay then. There's no fighting you. I won't even try. And it's a mission from Headmaster Cid. He wanted to see you, I think. Poor Cid. He's all alone down there, and so lonely. So, so lonely. Missing his favorite gunblader. So lonely. And now you're giving up on him, I guess."

Squall probably didn't care much about Cid's loneliness. Xu had to assume that other people's emotions were a lot of work for him when he was clearly just at beginner level regarding his own. But he looked vaguely unsettled at the suggestion that he might give up on anything. He always took that as a challenge. He changed his mind about the Centra mission.

Xu had his number.

Mind, she'd lied to him a little. Cid seemed to be doing fine. Very busy, whenever she checked in. Even more evasive than usual. But he didn't seem to be missing his favorite gunblader at all. In fact, Cid being a crappy judge of character, his favorite gunblader had never even been Squall.

* * *

"I can get you as far as Dollet," Cid told his patient. "But you'll have to get better before I can feel comfortable putting you on a transport. Though I guess I should do it before any SeeDs get here."

His patient said nothing. His patient was asleep.

Cid said, "Xu won't risk high level people. Not with the mission report I've given her. But I just wish Edea were here. She would know what to do. Went up to Trabia. Thinks she has to make up for it."

His patient still said nothing. Obviously.

Cid said, "Sounds like other people I know, huh?"

Silence in the Kramer household.

"Yeah, sorry," Cid said. "That's a bad joke."

* * *

March 17th. Three days after the Administrative Meeting. Vacation for Squall and Quistis was over. They were on their way to see Cid. Cid was lonely. Possibly. According to Xu. But then how would she know? Who really knew what to make of Cid?

"He was an excellent Headmaster," said Quistis. She said it like she was reciting something.

"He was a Headmaster, anyway," said Zell.

They'd brought Zell along largely because Zell had pestered them over it. For months, anytime he'd been home, his mother in Balamb had been throwing girls at him, beginning with the Library Girl and ending with the freakin' bait-and-tackle girl who lived on the pier and had a glass eye. His parents were disappointed that the Library Girl hadn't worked out. Possibly even disappointed that the Library Girl had forced Zell to reconsider certain aspects of his identity.

Ma in particular thought that, heroism having been gotten over with, Zell now owed it to the world to pass on his heroic genetic material, and also to give his loving mother grandchildren. Zell had been very direct with her about the fact that this was never in a million years going to happen. She loved him, so she took it well. But, if he was being honest with himself, she was a little let down over the whole thing; and he didn't want to deal with her crestfallen expression. Or her subsequent decision to try and set him up with the guy who sold train tickets to Timber.

Zell was an honest person. Taking honest inventory of his feelings (rapid-fire, while punching the air inside their transport sub, because that helped him think), he assessed Cid. And he realized that Cid was probably, honestly, much more manipulative than Cid let on.

"Headmaster Cid never gave up on a soul," Quistis was saying. "He was patient and understanding with SeeD cadets of all ages."

"Including the really young ones already being trained to be killers, so that we could all eventually get shoved at a sorceress," said Zell. "Look. That's weird. Isn't it?"

Zell had dreamed of being a SeeD as a kid. It had seemed so impersonal, so professional, so cool. Cid Kramer had been a far-off, distant name then. Some commander, some great thinker far above you, some gentle and wise presence who could make you strong, help you learn to fight.

And then he'd learned that Cid Kramer was not so distant. Cid Kramer had known Zell since Zell had been a tiny baby. Told Zell some of his first bedtime stories. And then cut the connection, pretended he had no idea who Zell was, tossed some memory-draining GFs at Zell, put weapons in Zell's hands, and pointed him at a sorceress.

Which, honestly, made the whole thing more than weird.

Fucked up was a better assessment.

"You're a part of it too, so there's no use acting like you're above it," said Squall, with a censuring tone. Squall probably didn't know what to make of Cid. Everything Cid had done with Zell, he'd really perfected with Squall: the golden boy Cid had always meant to force into the Commander position. But, Squall being Squall, good luck figuring out how something like that had affected him, because he'd never tell you.

"And remember how Cid was at the Orphanage?" Quistis put in.

None of them actually did remember. As SeeDs, they used Guardian Forces regularly. And GFs existed to do two things: make you an unstoppable military powerhouse, and to soak up all your memories. So they were very good fighters. And extremely poor remember-ers.

"He took us on a picnic once," said Squall, to no one in particular. "No. Yes. I don't know. Maybe?"

"Yes," said Quistis.

"Yeah?" said Squall.

"I think so," said Quistis. "He gave me a choco-back ride. No. Maybe he gave Selphie a choco-back ride."

Zell said nothing. He was still punching the air in silence. Which didn't mean he wasn't thinking. Zell was in thinking overdrive.

Squall and Quistis didn't have parents. Not really. Sure, Quistis had two people who wrote her sometimes and reminded her that they'd only adopted her because such a pretty girl really should have been made Headmistress or at least wife of the SeeD Commander by now. And Squall had long-lost relation Laguna, who he liked to pretend didn't exist, even though this was silly, because Laguna headed up the most powerful nation on the planet.

But only Zell had a Ma and a Pa. Ma with her matchmaking skills and Pa with his unflappable acceptance and Pa with his deliberate calm and Ma with her love.

They were worth a million of Cid Kramer. They'd never wanted anything out of their charge – their son – they just wanted him to be happy. Whereas, with Cid, any desire for their – his, Squall's, Quistis's, Selphie's, Irvine's – all of them… Any wish for their happiness had always been incidental to bigger things, hadn't it?

Yeah. It had been.

It wasn't like that didn't make sense. Years ago, Cid and Edea had discovered that someday a crazy and evil sorceress would want to compress time. So why worry about the emotional needs of a bunch of orphans? There were bigger things to deal with. But even so. In Zell's head there were all these slowly-resurfacing memories of Cid Kramer laughing with them as children, giving them choco-back rides, taking them on picnics...

But that wasn't Cid Kramer. Not really. Zell knew Cid Kramer. Cid Kramer had become – had had to be, maybe – the kind of man who'd done anything to accomplish his goals. Anything. Put gunblades in the hands of five year olds. Sent young men to kill their mother figures. Waited and watched and made deals with the Shumi.

He wasn't just some fat old lazy guy cowering in the corner. He was an opportunist, cunning, a survivalist, a Sorceress's Knight, Seifer Almasy the first.

Squall aside, Zell didn't – couldn't – have very high opinions of guys like that. Zell wasn't a guy like that himself. Yes, he was SeeD. Yes, he would shoot and kill and punch (mostly punch) if he was told to. But he was also somebody's kid. Which meant that he was always thinking about how other people were people's kids, too. He had a strangely powerful sense of humanity, Zell. His humanity. Other people's. He took it hard when people let that down, forgot to act human, screwed other people over with no reason.

When you struck out at another person, used them in a scheme, screwed them up, threw them away, blew up their Gardens, cowered instead of defending them – it wasn't like hitting air. You were hitting something, fucking with something, with a living being. And maybe it was easy to forget that if your weapon of choice was a gunblade or a whip or your dog or something, but Zell was a martial artist. He'd chosen to be a martial artist. Because that meant you felt every hit connect; you couldn't run away from your actions. So you understood that those actions had consequences, and in a weird way you became more cautious.

And you didn't want to be the Knight or the SeeD commander. You didn't want to strike out because there was some glorious end or secret plan that might justify it, in the end. That would just make you the asshole, the guy who deserved a good punch in the gut.

Zell punched the air.

Cid, he imagined, would be a lot more solid than the air. But soft. A gunblader gone to seed.

No pun intended.

"I think he gave me a toolkit or something once," Quistis mused. "He was such a good Headmaster."

Squall sighed. He said, "Matron's the one I miss, really."

Matron was a whole other can of grat crap. Zell's punches got a little more aggressive.

Just a little. He couldn't remember Matron. What he did remember was nice. Picnics. Storytime. Chocobo-back rides. But those memories were hard to reach. He had to really try to get his GFs to give them up. And when he got them back they were hazy, changed. Whatever Matron had given him, if she'd given him anything, didn't exist as memory, just as some deep-seated impulse.

Some weird, prickly feeling that she and Cid Kramer weren't and had never been anything like real parents, not really. Maybe they'd wanted to be, at some point. But they'd become something else entirely.

* * *

"Tell me about this little group of Cid Kramer's, the ones said the be enemies of the sorceress," asked the man in red.

He said 'Cid Kramer' experimentally, like he couldn't quite get his mind around the words. A couple of times he'd said, 'Kid Kramer,' instead, because the hard k sound came very naturally to him. But otherwise the name sat on his tongue like an ugly, heavy thing. He almost felt he should be offended to have to say it.

But the person he was speaking to only shook his head in response.

The man in red took stock of him. Not a bad specimen. Dark, tall, broad-shouldered, handsome cheekbones, wide dark eyes. Nothing about him seemed to have been bleached by the sun of his homeworld; he was, unlike the two who'd been brought in alongside him, almost a perfect example of a person. The real pity was that neither he nor the girl had been the ones sorceress-touched.

That had been the other one.

So it would have been high sacrilege to acknowledge this one as anything other than a future drone, a clockwork man ticking out penance until the end of his days. After all, he'd committed high crimes during the rise of Edea.

But, at the very least, there was a kind of simple loyalty to him. The man in red was fairly sure the loyalty didn't extend to Edea, though. So maybe this creature would redeem himself yet. He certainly hoped so. He had a great deal of respect for his subject already. Electricity the prisoner bore with good grace. The whip? Very similar. Temporary poisons injected into the veins made him roll his eyes back and bear it until he sweated it out. Magical ailments of all kinds made him grit his teeth. He only shook and wet himself when the Inquisitrix performed her mental tortures.

And he'd never once spoken. Indeed, once they'd separated him from his sorceress-touched friend, all Raijin had been willing to give them was a baleful glare, a moan now and then, and a trickle of blood out of the side of his mouth when he bit down too hard on his tongue. So the man in red held him in very high esteem.

But relationships needed to be built on mutual respect. Didn't they?

He fitted Raijin into the press. He watched clinically as the great torture machine squeezed down on the young man. Very big, very strong. And now feeling the weight of tons of steel squeezing down on him, crushing his broad chest. It only took a minute for fear to settle into his eyes. Good.

The man in red stopped the machine.

"It is commendable that you've told us little about Cid Kramer," he told Raijin. "Or the Defeater Leonhart, or any of these worthy new names. Do you know? We've even heard about them down here. Fame does spread."

Raijin coughed, spat out blood. Possibly his ribs were cracked. He said, "You took Fujin, and Seifer—"

More coughing. His lungs were probably cracked.

But this was new. A name for the great criminal, the great failure, the one soaked in sorceress magic. Cipher. What a perfect, funny little name. The man in red actually laughed to hear it, and clapped Raijin happily on the shoulder. A cipher could be a secret, or a kind of hidden message. It could be nothing at all. It was heavy with symbolism, with things yet unrevealed – it promised something so valuable that one had to encode it. But it could also be something, as yet, unimportant.

What a very fitting name.

Let it be told that the children of Hyne knew well whom to bless, and whom to snare.

"That almost makes me like him," he told Raijin. "And you've been a very strong, very good friend to him, haven't you? But not so for the sorceress Edea. You were no friend of hers."

He put a comforting hand on the sweaty skull with its close-cropped dark hair.

"'M not gonna tell you where she is," Raijin forced out. "Don't even know."

That seemed fair. And Raijin was such an honest, trustworthy, loyal fellow, that the man in red was charmed by his answer, and believed him.

"But what did you think of her, the former sorceress?" he asked. "What did you know?"

"She—she brainwashed him," Raijin said.

The man in red raised an eyebrow. That did not quite accord with what he knew, but he let it lie. Dropping the press any more might crush Raijin's lungs, and there went the questioning.

"He trusted her, y'know? He didn't—didn't tell us much. But he told us that he trusted her. 'Cause he knew her, way deep in his brain, once he dragged it out of the GFs. She was supposed to be his—like his mom. He trusted her. Then she got picked up by Ultimecia—"

The man in red smiled. Good. Very good. Just what he wanted.

"She says she was just as brainwashed," Raijin continued, struggling to form the words.

"Now, that has to be something of a lie," said the man in red. "Or she was simply not a very good sorceress. It takes a very weak, very small, very fearful woman to be unable to hold her own against another of Hyne's chosen."

"No," Raijin said, sounding for all the world like he didn't want to believe that. "It can happen. To any sorceress. It's not about weak. Because Rin—"

He stopped. Although up until now his face had been twisted in pain more often than not, it had never shown horror. Now he seemed horrified. By whatever he had been about to say.

Good. They were making progress.

"Yes?" said the man in red.

Raijin shook his head again, as best as he could trapped between the two heavy steel blocks of the press. The man in red patted his shoulder supportively. Crushing him more than this might shut him up permanently. But he could take it little by little. Start small.

He traced down one of Raijin's powerful arms, and contemplated grinding the wrist-bone to powder.

Rin. Rinoa. Miss Heartilly. News of her had trickled down even to here. And now Raijin indicated that he might know her personally. Very good. Raijin was an exemplary fellow. So loyal! But also so well-connected. He knew Edea. He knew Rinoa. And he probably knew something of the other one.

The man in red really was very glad to have him there.


	3. Chapter 3

Some time later, in the Headmistress's office, the normally easygoing Irvine Kinneas was looking to complain.

Not about anything Xu could help him with. Just in general.

"They called me a loose man," said Irvine. "Me! I mean: bisexual horndog, fine. But loose?"

Xu didn't really know what Irvine was expecting. He wasn't exactly circumspect about his sexual proclivities. As far as Xu could tell, he was attracted to anything. If it promised intimacy, he seemed drawn to it like a bite bug to caterchipillar feces. But his work was always top-notch. He was one of six world-renowned heroes and the only person ever to make SeeD without officially passing or even considering taking the standard SeeD test. And his scores out of G-Garden were better than she'd learned to expect from G-Garden (the crappiest of the gardens, in Xu's opinion. Postwar, it was disintegrating fast in the wake of increased Deling City totalitarianism. And Xu wasn't sure she'd miss it if it shut down completely). The paranoid secret blacklists Martine had kept put Irvine at "difficult" and "friendless" but also "promising if handled well" and "a natural shot." He was a loner in a different way than Squall. He didn't put people off-balance with sudden bursts of secret romantic emotion and extreme stubbornness. Quite the opposite. Irvine was malleable. And personable and charming when he bothered to exert himself, in fact so charming that you forgot that a lot of the time, rather than acting like the shameless flirt he claimed he was, he was actually very quiet, very withdrawn.

All in all, Xu didn't hate him.

Plus, he was dating Selphie Tilmitt now, so Xu had some faith that the days of his worst sexual excesses were over and done with.

"Aaaand I don't even know why these people think they can pass judgment on Irvy. They sound like losers. They just hang out in libraries," Selphie told Xu.

"I hang out in libraries," Xu said.

She did, too. People tended to use the B-Garden library to fight and gossip and plan things, and it was a good place to overhear information. To get a handle on what was going on: the student-level view of Garden. Xu had a hard time getting students to really bond with her (was she too competent? Too Headmistress-ly? Cid had never had this problem), so she sometimes resorted to spying on them.

"You hang out?" said Selphie. "I thought you just worked all the time."

Xu tried to think of something equally blunt and rude to say back, but failed, because Selphie had offered to help sort through paperwork with her. Selphie didn't have to be doing that, so Selphie had the social upper hand. As Selphie usually did.

Though Xu suspected she was only being helpful in order to wrangle a bigger budget for the Garden Festival Committee.

Selphie was quite possibly the hardest person in Garden to figure out. A Trabia import, she was hopelessly ditzy, very clumsy when off the battlefield; and obsessed with pop culture, the latest bands, ridiculous pulp magazines about adventuring reporters, who was dating whom and who had dumped whom in the middle of a training session. She knew everybody. Everybody knew her. She published a lot of her opinions on her blog, hiding very little, and was always very direct with people. She didn't seem especially intellectual or gifted. Just very improbably competent. And well-trained. Quick. Forthright and friendly; the kind of bubbly personality that you needed in a place like Garden, because in a pinch she could be counted on to hold the rest together like glue, through the sheer force of her sociability.

Xu was also not going to discount the possibility that Selphie might be a grade-A manipulator. Might be. The proof for this unlikely conclusion lay in just how many hapless innocents were now toiling away as members of the Garden Festival Committee.

Selphie was also clearly something of a romantic daredevil. Given that she was dating Irvine Kinneas.

"It's weird that Rinoa's friends hang out in libraries, though," Irvine was saying. He had his legs on Xu's desk. All Xu's attempts to get him to remove them resulted in a sleazy raised eyebrow and Selphie batting at him. Then they would retreat into a bizarre courtship dance involving Selphie faking annoyance and Irvine faking even more sleaze, so by now Xu had just given up.

Plus, he was tackling the invoices from the local T-Rexaur breeders. And the complaints from the T-Rexaur Preservation Alliance. The Alliance had sprung up in Balamb determined to end what they saw of Garden's cruel use of the creatures. Xu despised them, and hated even acknowledging their existence because she privately suspected they existed just to make her life harder. So Irvine was doing her an even bigger favor than Selphie was, and Xu decided to give him a pass.

"Thing is," Irvine said, "Not to be rude—"

"But you're going to be anyway, aren't you?" said Xu.

"He never learned not to be. He had no mother," Selphie told her. "His mother was blown to smithereens in an attack on a Galbadian outpost when he was a baby—"

"I think Matron said she just got sick and didn't get better, actually," Irvine said.

"My story's better," said Selphie, "Because explosions. And because we don't remember our parents anyway and probably never will, soooo we can just make them die as horribly as we want."

Selphie's interests tended towards the macabre. Her humor was dark. Xu thought it was a Trabia thing. They had nineteen-hour nights in Trabia for half the year. That kind of environment made for some weird personalities.

"What did you make up for your birth parents?" Irvine said.

"Thrown before Sorceress Adel and tortured because they wouldn't talk—"

"I wish you wouldn't talk while we do this," Xu said.

"—and then my dad was drawn and quartered—"

"They definitely haven't done that since the age of Vascaroon, but okay," Xu said.

"—and my mom, my beautiful mom, wasted away in an Estharian dungeon, dreaming of me and my eleven lost siblings until her dying hour."

"That's weirdly sweet," Irvine said, "But kind of dark."

"I know. I have problems," Selphie said. "I've never pretended otherwise."

To her credit, this made her a better functioning human being than ninety five percent of Garden's other tragic orphans (who made up a good sixty percent of Garden).

The others tended to think they were perfectly normal and had no social problems at all and definitely no abandonment complexes that made them act like assholes. And also that their parents were probably living somewhere but they just couldn't remember because GFs. So screw you, Headmistress, we're not going for a psych eval. We're fine.

"Anyway, what were we talking about?" Selphie said. "Oh, right. Rinoa's friends."

"You were talking about Rinoa's friends," said Xu. "I'm updating the budget spreadsheet."

"Wow, Xu, that sounds so much more interesting," said Selphie. "If you've got grat poop for brains."

This was such a blatantly inappropriate thing to say to the Headmistress that only Selphie, clocking in at around five feet with a flawless field mission record and a limit break that could level mountains, could have gotten away with it. That was thing about Selphie's particular generation of SeeDs. They got results, and with results came payment. Funding. So Xu put up with them.

"Okay, but, like, Xu would hang out in a library, because Xu is, you know, not a debutante or a belle of society, or a fun kind of girl," said Irvine.

"Xu is your freakin' boss," said Xu.

Irvine tipped his hat in her direction to show her that she had a point. But then he crossed one leg over the other, nudged some paperwork to the floor in the process, and kept talking anyway.

"But these are Galbadia's elite," he said. "Did you catch some of those names Squall dropped?"

"Like a bad STD," said Selphie. "Same as Deling's Ministers and Heads of State, right?"

"Right! And those people's kids should be in a nightclub. They should be snortin' tonberry dust in the back room of a Deling club. Like, who in Hyne's wide ass hangs out in a library unless they're poor and not cool?"

"I was raised solidly lower middle class," Xu said. Irvine, like most Galbadians, had class hangups that put Dolletian elitism to shame. "And I hang out in—"

"You don't, though," Selphie complained. "Hang out. Ever." Then she turned to Irvine. "Nerds, Irvy. Who understands them?"

This was rich, coming from a girl who ran six fan pages and knew more about advanced transportation technology than any other person on the planet.

"You know who's a nerd? Tangentially? Rinoa," said Irvine. "A hot nerd. Completely a hot nerd."

"She's our friend, so my jealous side can live with you saying that," Selphie said. "And yeah. She's a cutie."

Rinoa chose that moment to walk in. As if Xu needed more of a headache today.

"Who's a cutie?" she asked offhandedly. Then she turned to Xu, apparently the person she really wanted to speak to. "Headmistress Xu!"

"No, not her," said Selphie. "She's okay. But we meant you!"

"Aw," said Rinoa, oddly touched.

"Okay, everybody out," said Xu. "I'll just do my paperwork on my own."

Rinoa put her hands on her hips and gave the general impression that she was now planting herself in Xu's carpet and wouldn't be moved by all the SeeDs in all the world. Since she was a sorceress and friends with five of the best SeeDs in the world, Xu could envision her succeeding at this.

"Fine," Xu said. "What?"

"Squall says," Rinoa began, somewhat menacingly, "That you are planning on forcing the Trepies out."

"Really?" said Irvine. This shocked him enough that he moved his legs to the floor and sat up straight. This was the first time in his entire acquaintance with Xu that Xu had ever seen him sit up straight. Xu had known him for seven months at this point. Seven slouching, lounging, sleazy months.

"Aw, what?" said Selphie. "I'm friends with some of the Trepies!"

"Sefie, my love," Irvine said, "Who aren't you friends with? You're friends with that one Marlboro in the Trainin' Center that always runs away from encounters."

"Sunny is a shrewd survivor," said Selphie very seriously.

"And apparently you named him," Xu said.

"I've gotta level," Irvine said, "I know Sunny. I don't even know the Trepies' names."

"Well, yeah, but who does?" said Selphie. "I mean, I guess it's on a roster somewhere."

She started poking around on Xu's desk, as though Xu were hiding the identities of the Trepies on some kind of secret blacklist, in the vein of that psychopath, Martine. Xu made shooing motions, but to no effect.

"Some of them are competent enough, though," Irvine mused. "But the competence never outweighs the crazy with the Trepies. It's a tenuous balance: competent and crazy."

Xu eyed Selphie and Irvine both at this point.

"It sure is," she said. "Now stop wasting my time and do my paperwork, or get out."

"Alright, Xu, but first!" said Rinoa, pointing a finger at Xu ominously. "You are being so unfair. It's an injustice. You can't just set the Trepies up and kick them out! There should be procedures, and systems—"

Rinoa was not just a sorceress. She was a born crusader as well. She embodied a heady cocktail of noblesse oblige, stubborness, and her own innate sense of unfairness. And so she was the first ever sorceress to do things like liberate Timber, and champion the rights of gays and lesbians in Deling City, and donate publicly to those T-Rexaur Alliance assholes in Balamb despite her boyfriend being SeeD commander because animal rights were important and also she had to be impartial.

Rinoa wasn't a SeeD at all, so Xu shouldn't have had to put up with her. Sometimes Xu really resented that she had to put up with her. She'd actually thrown Rinoa out of Garden multiple times, but Squall kept inviting her back.

"Rinoa, you are not a SeeD," Xu said carefully. "So you do not get a say. We have had this discussion. Nine times."

"I speak for Squall while he's away," said Rinoa loftily. "And my friends speak for me."

"Right!" said Selphie, jumping up and down in an impassioned manner.

"I don't know. I'm with Xu," said Irvine. "We can't have crazy people in Garden. Really everybody should be gettin' a psych eval."

"Thank you," Xu said.

"Not Selphie, though," said Irvine. "She might not pass."

"Irvine, you wouldn't pass!" Rinoa said.

Irvine looked thoughtful. He tipped his hat in agreement.

"And even I might not pass," Rinoa continued, as though to teach them all a great lesson in humility and fairness.

Xu said, "You aren't a SeeD, so—"

Rinoa ignored her. "Maybe Zell or Quistis would. Maybe. But Squall definitely wouldn't pass becau—"

"Squall's a trainwreck," Selphie said, nodding. "Great guy. Such a trainwreck."

"I won't tell him you said that," said Rinoa.

"You can," said Selphie.

"It's not like he doesn't know," Irvine added, putting his legs back up and slouching back down. "Squall's self-aware now."

"Okay, but," Rinoa said, lowering her voice, "I worry about him."

"Are we gossiping about your boyfriend now?" said Xu. "Could you maybe not get comfortable? Because my office isn't the place to do this."

"Have you seen what the papers write about him?" said Rinoa.

"Have you seen what the papers write about all of you?" said Xu.

Seriously. Sometimes she had to remind herself that it would give Garden more bad press to fire them than it would to retain them. And that they were good SeeDs. If slightly unhinged.

"He's now going through this new phase," said Rinoa, still ignoring her, "Where he has, and I'm not kidding here, negative social skills. I don't mean none, like he had before. That was fine. He used to be able to go so quiet and professional! Like a dream! But now, on the number line of social aptitude, he's on the negative side. It's like he discovered his personality, and his personality—"

"Sucks?" Selphie said.

"No!" said Rinoa. "Well…"

"Well?" Xu said. "No. What am I saying? Don't prompt her."

"Go on," said Irvine. Probably because he was a sleazy asshole.

"We were meeting with the new Timber delegates and the Deling City representatives, and I had to do all the talking. Not because he wouldn't talk! Because when he did talk, he was the most undiplomatic person on the planet. He had the Galbadians ready to conquer us again, just to get back at him for being, you know—"

"A complete dick?" Selphie offered.

"Not very nice," said Rinoa. "Let's say not very nice. His inner self is just not very nice!"

"Shocker there," Xu muttered.

"That's why we have Xu, though," Selphie said. "To talk to bigwigs and get us money and handle all the annoying stuff that Squall can't deal with."

"Excuse me?" said Xu. That wasn't at all how she would characterize her job. Squall was not what motivated her. In fact, with his sparkling personality, Squall occasionally stepped in as a truly effective de-motivator.

"Well, look, do you want Squall to do it?" said Irvine.

"I—" Xu pondered this.

Dear Hyne. The very notion was terrifying.

"Right?" said Selphie. "Trainwreck."

"No, see, I think he can be diplomatic if he just believes in himself!" Rinoa insisted.

Rinoa was a big believer in believing. She was a dreamer. She thought you could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough. And in her defense, you really could get whatever you wanted if you wished and worked hard enough. And also your father was General Caraway.

"I mean, that was the whole reason I asked him to Deling," said Rinoa. "Gryphon Preparatory alums—"

"You went to prep school," said Selphie, sounding unsurprised.

"The most exclusive prep school in Galbadia," said Irvine, sounding even more unsurprised.

"Of course she went to the most exclusive prep school in Galbadia," said Xu, rolling her eyes.

Rinoa put up a hand. "Whatever! As Squall would say. My point is: alumni get free access to our library, and our library has all these books on social aptitude and how to make people do what you want by convincing them that you're nice even if you're not—"

"I never had to learn that," said Selphie. "I've just always known how."

"It comes naturally to you," Irvine agreed.

"And then, you know, I ran into my friends and…" Rinoa trailed off. "It was weird. I mean, not the Squall thing. Squall having social problems is normal."

"We won't tell him you said that," said Irvine magnanimously.

"Shut up," said Rinoa. "I just had a thought. That was weird."

They all looked at her expectantly. All except for Xu, who suggested (again) that she have her weird thoughts somewhere that wasn't the Headmistress's office. But Rinoa just continued her personal tradition of ignoring the Headmistress.

"I'm not, like, super close with these people," Rinoa said. "I just grew up with them. But I would have expected to find them in the back of some club snorting tonberry dust or something. Most of them are, you know. Party animals. Not bookish. And there were a lot of things that were weird about that day, actually. It was just an odd visit."

"Well, your boyfriend met too many people and had a small meltdown over his dad," Selphie offered.

"Normal," Rinoa repeated, waving her away. "No. The thing was: I could sense magic in use. In the library, I mean. And – look – I don't want to rat anybody out to the Presidential stooges for unauthorized magic use, much less an old friend, but the fact is there are laws, and usually they're not so blatant about violating them because their parents make the laws, so—"

"Magic?" said Xu. "In Deling City?"

That was a problem. Xu leaned forward across her desk and caught Selphie and Irvine's gazes. They looked grim.

"Ohhhhhhh wowza," said Selphie. "Not good."

"Violation of our ceasefire agreement, right?" said Irvine.

Rinoa looked at them, bewildered.

"I think it was probably just some people junctioning where the army wouldn't look for them?" she said. "Pretty smart, when you think about it, since none of the Commissioner's advisors and staff would agree to arrest somebody at their alma mater, and—"

"No, no," said Irvine. "See, last month Xu here did some talking with the Deling City bigwigs."

"For Squall," said Selphie, "Since he's a mess."

"For Garden," said Xu irritably. "I renewed the nonaggression pact with Deling City. Not going to be long-term thing. Just a ceasefire, like you said, until we get Trabia up and running. We review it in a month. It's routine at this point; you wouldn't have heard much about it."

"But you put in a new clause this last time, right?" said Irvine.

She had. The situation in Deling was complex. But to boil it down to basics: Galbadia hated Garden.

They always had, really. Cid Kramer commanded no respect in Deling City. For one thing, he was perfectly willing to take missions that revolved around stabbing Galbadia in the back. For another, Deling City had once been the greatest military power the world had ever seen. But nowadays their soldiers were shoddy. Their technology slightly outdated. Their empire? Crumbling. And a lot of that had to do with Cid, and B-Garden, and the SeeDs.

Cid and Edea had brung G-Garden into existence as a kind of compromise. Even in the early days, the Galbadians had suspected the threat SeeD might pose to them. So they'd been offered a Garden of their own, to pacify them and to keep Vinzer Deling from ordering a kill strike on what had been, back then, Cid and Dr. K and the guy who manned the front gate and some orphans they'd scrounged up from who-knows-where.

G-Garden was to have similar facilities; similar curriculum options. Like B-garden, low-to-nonexistent tuition. It would open itself up to Deling City's shadier, more paranoid elite to cover costs, a hit squad camouflaged as a school. And the hit squad was an instant hit. Vinzer Deling and his cronies had a lot of uses for private assassins, and they liked very much that Martine, Cid's rather faithless appointee, fed excess students right into the Galbadian army rather than recommending most of them for SeeD.

As long as there was a tenuous connection, a strange alliance between B- and G- gardens, Deling City had left B-Garden pretty much alone. They had operated under the assumption that anything Cid's kids could do, their own could do better.

Cid, for his part, had scrambled to keep an edge over the place. He did this through magic use. GFs. There were some in G-Garden, but not very many, and Cid conspired to acquire most of these in the end through any means possible. He'd believed that GFs would mean the difference between life and death for Balamb Garden, if ever they happened to go against an opponent as powerful as their sister school.

He'd been right. Xu had seen it happen. When the Shumi had turned on them, the SeeDs had held out – just barely – not because they were necessarily better fighters, but because they had more fluency with magic and GFs than their opponents. A skinny second-year couldn't survive against Shumi wielding natural blue magic, much less a full grown Galbadian with years of military experience, but if you equipped that second-year with Firas, Thundagas, the ability to draw, the ability to Cure, and a massive monster, to boot, the tables turned.

Xu had played nice for the first few rounds of Deling City negotiations – she'd had to; they'd taken a big hit to their feeder school out in Trabia; and half the SeeDs were cleaning up moon monsters in Esthar. But she'd brought the claws out last month. Thanks to their magic and GFs, B-Garden could wipe the floor with the Galbadian army, if they had to. And Xu was going to make damn sure they kept it that way.

"I did put in an extra clause," Xu said. "Thing is, Rinoa, they're required to turn over any new GFs they find in this period to Balamb Garden."

Irvine said, "I'm pretty sure any GFs that G-Garden personnel had came here eventually. Zona Seeker's used for training here now, not to mention Bismarck, Ramuh—"

"Right," said Xu. "We snapped up every one Martine ever tried to hide from us. It must be some new one. Deling's Cabinet has a handful they're allowed to keep in Galbadia. But the only people they've listed as currently junctioning any of those in and around Deling are a few highranking soldiers posted at the city borders."

Irvine said, "Maybe someone dragged one of those GFs back into the city to use—"

"Against the ceasefire. They wouldn't dare," Xu said. "No, if they did that? We would be well within our rights to expose it."

Selphie said, "So who's gonna be able to do magic without GFs? In the middle of the city?"

"They're hiding something. Go find out what," said Xu. "Keep it low profile if you can, but find out at all costs. That's an order."

For all their crazy, she and Irvine were good SeeDs. They went when ordered. They even took Rinoa with them. When they'd gone, Xu looked over the reports Selphie had been working on, and also Irvine's response to the T-Rexaur complaints. Perfect. Literally perfect work.

She sighed. She looked at her budget spreadsheet. It was full of mistakes.

* * *

Raijin, the exemplary prisoner, had reached his limit.

Oh, not in terms of talking. The loyal brute kept his words in his head, for the most part, after letting slip about Miss Heartilly. Which was a shame, because any information on those who had been touched by Ultimecia was absolutely crucial at this juncture.

No, Raijin had simply reached a mental limit. And it seemed prudent to patch up his mind to some degree, so that they could continue with the interrogation later on.

It had happened like this: the man in red had broken both wrists, then both ankles, then both knees. But all the while they'd been getting along famously. Raijin even had a polite moan of pain, something very understated, suitable, as if he really was the mercenary he claimed to be. And the man in red very much enjoyed his stiff mercenary's upper lip. So as he'd done all this to Raijin. he made sure to be conscientious about little things, to wipe tears from his eyes, to rub his elbow comfortingly. And he told him all about topics he thought might interest him: loyalty, criminality, knighthood, magic.

"Sei-Seifer's more than a criminal," Raijin forced out. "And Fujin. My—my sister."

"They can't help you, I'm afraid," the man in red told him sadly. "A shame. A shame also that Fujin lacks the ability to receive the sorceress power, don't you think? How different your lives would have been! Now Miss Heartilly, on the other hand—"

Raijin clamped his mouth shut. He wouldn't speak anymore on that. Instead he was caught up in pleading for his friend, that foolish boy who'd stumbled onto so much power.

"We strive to make your friend useful as well," the man in red assured him.

Horrified, despairing, Raijin actually lunged in his bonds, swiped at him.

It was like a very large, very unruly kitten taking pet against its masters. The man in red laughed.

But of course he soon sobered also, because this wouldn't do. So disrespectful. He called in the Inquisitrix to dose the prisoner with some more toxic magic. A bout of painful insanity would serve him right. But then, on returning, he found very little evidence that Raijin was recovering from the bout.

He was screaming and screeching, his eyes wild and paranoid. His mind had been slightly shifted, cast out of rational thinking, that was all. The subconscious made to surface, the fears made to take hold, the parts of him that were sensible and capable of controlling his pain and anger banished.

Then the Inquisitrix put those parts back in, of course, but it was a harrowing process for the victim, and it seemed it would take Raijin some time to right himself.

Annoyed, the man in red determined that they had to send him to the healers. They would continue. But later. Once he'd been patched up sufficiently to withstand some more torture, of the mental and physical variety.

"Now, I know he is of the common and criminal element," said the man in red to the healer they had on hand, "But to hear him speak of the sorceress!"

Well. He supposed he hadn't heard him speak as much of the sorceress as he would have liked. But still. Raijin's sturdiness, his strength, his ability to drag it on. That was thoroughly refreshing and enjoyable. The healer gazed at the wreck of him, appalled, as though she thought he might not recover. But the man in red knew better. Raijin would recover. There was a fascinating inner resilience to him, like blows and mockery and torture really meant very little to him, like he held on to some hope for something bigger.

Distantly, the man in red wondered if this was common for Kramer's group. Were they all like this? Were they this hardy, were their spirits this buoyant and strong? Oh, the Garden was no real target, not really. This was limited to the events of the Ultimecia war, to those whose minds now bore the unmistakable imprint of the future sorceress.

But what might it mean, if they did seize the Garden?

Lucky Raijin should have some fellow prisoners! And this whole time the man in red had been assuming that Raijin was unique, was special. It made a certain amount of sense to assume so; no one had ever declared that this Garden lot was, on the whole, remarkable in any way. But what if theywere? What if they all struggled and fought and possessed vast reserves of grand loyalty?

Terrific.

"I surrender him to your care and you must take good care of him," the man in red heard himself saying, distantly.

But how frustrating it was. Their chief aims were to go unfulfilled in the meantime. And the man in red so liked spending time with Raijin, besides. His normal work, outside of handling Raijin, was really very boring, not half as congenial.

* * *

"Here we are," said Squall. He said it very grimly. Like visits to Cid were arduous personal missions that he set himself. Which this one basically was.

"So you are," said Cid.

"Cid, we've come to see you," said Squall. And if you looked very hard, you could actually see him checking it off in his head. Visit Cid Because Cid Is Old And Lonely And Xu Said I Wasn't Up To The Task.

Check. Done. On with the mission.

"That's very nice, Squall," Cid said. "Come back tomorrow. I'm busy right now. Congrats on renewing the nonaggression pact!"

Then he shut his door in Squall, Quistis, and Zell's faces.

There was silence for a second.

"What the hell?" said Zell.

Squall, who had been momentarily stunned to be so completely dismissed by the man whose Garden he'd saved, snapped back to attention and banged on the door again.

"Cid!" he said.

"I'm very busy. So nice to see you!" came Cid's voice through the door, muffled and far off.

Squall stopped banging. He just stood there for a minute. His normally blank-if-handsome features took on a slightly petulant cast, so that suddenly he seemed less Squall Leonhart, Garden Commander, and more Squall Leonhart, offended eighteen-year-old.

"Well, this is weirdly typical of Cid," Zell muttered. He punched one of Cid's windowpanes in annoyance. He accidentally dislodged one of Edea's flowerpots. It shattered, and her poppies thumped sadly on the ground.

Zell didn't even feel that bad about it.

It was typical. As Headmaster, Cid had had a tendency to do things like summon you up to his office, only to run off mid-meeting after saying something ominous about how the future needed his attention. Or to show up just as you were about to get chewed out by a Shumi guardian and gently get you off the hook, only to vanish just when you wanted to ask him important questions like why the Shumi guardians were all assholes in the first place. Or to send you on missions that risked international strife with Galbadia, home of a fellow Garden, only to cower and hide when this left the SeeDs consumed by internal conflict.

That was always Cid's way. Not a very good Headmaster or a terribly courageous leader. Just the only one they'd ever had.

Squall crossed his arms and glared furiously at the door, as though he could get it to open by anger alone.

"Oh for—let me," said Quistis. She rapped professionally a few times and said, "We've been assigned to the mission."

Silence. Then some scratching sounds. Then the sound of Cid drawing the bolt. The door opened to show his face through a crack.

"That's a bit below your paygrade," he told them, ultra-seriously. "It's just a few sinkholes. But I have complete faith in you! And of course I'm very flattered you would come all this way just to help me. Help yourselves to the spare rooms in the orphanage. Bye now. See you tomorrow; we can discuss it then."

Then he closed the door again and didn't open it after that. They circled his house, a small, rambling bungalow Garden had flown out for him as a retirement gift, so that he and Edea wouldn't have to rebuild their shabby orphanage, and so that they could have a nice spot away from adoring crowds (mostly for Cid) and angry mobs (mostly for Edea).

Cid had drawn all the curtains and locked the back door.

They retreated to the orphanage. Squall was pissed; Quistis was carefully neutral; and Zell wanted to ask about the sinkholes, because he'd only joined the mission as an afterthought – technically he still had vacation time – and he hadn't had a spare second to take a peek at their objectives, what with Pa practically throwing him at some guy who was moonlighting at the Balamb garage.

"Xu said he was lonely!" Squall said, upset in that blank way of his that didn't quite show on his face, but still got you feeling kinda queasy because you suspected he was about to go off his rocker and do something like cart an unconscious girl to the hidden city of Esthar just to show the world how pissed off and secretly brimming with romantic turmoil he was.

"Xu's full of it," Zell agreed, just to pacify the guy. He headed towards Quistis's pack and flipped the top open. He found the mission files. Quistis didn't notice, because she was doing her best to talk Squall down in a mature and level-headed fashion, although if you looked at her eyes you could see that she was also annoyed by the whole thing.

"We all knew Xu was throwing us an easy mission so that she could figure out what to do about the Trepies," Quistis said. "It was a favor to me, really."

"She's unfair," Squall said. "She does personal favors for her best friends. Not objective at all. And then she—"

"I don't know that getting rid of the Trepies would be just for my benefit," Quistis hedged. "Or that I'd call her my best friend."

Zell tuned them out and flipped through the file. There wasn't a lot to flip through.

**Re: Sinkholes in the Kashkabald**  
Referred to: Arismendi, Xu  
Client: Kramer, Cid  
Objectives: Figure out what the heck is causing sinkholes in the Kashkabald  
Client Comments: It's v. worrisome! We planned to retire to Centra and now there are these sinkholes! What if they spread to our land? Thanks kids. By the way you are doing a great job. HEADMASTER CID

Seriously?

Seriously?

"She's actually really intense," Quistis was saying. "All she does is read and play Triple Triad, and read some more. And she's married to her work. I mean, what a nice girl. But so intense. Too intense."

Squall looked like this was doing absolutely nothing to improve his mood. Zell decided to interrupt.

"The Kashkabald isn't even anywhere near here," Zell said.

"What?" said Quistis, thrown off balance.

"This mission," Zell said. "It's bull. The Kashkabald is on the other side of the continent. Where no one lives."

Quistis and Squall blinked at him.

"Yeah," Squall said. "So what? It's a favor for Cid."

Doing favors for friends was right out with him, but apparently Cid was a different story.

"It might destabilize the continent," Quistis added. "You know, down the line. In a seismic way."

That was not in keeping with what Zell had learned about seismic activity, but since Quistis had been an instructor and all and probably knew more than him, he let it slide.

"Say it might. That would probably be years from now," Zell said. "Why ask SeeD to investigate it now?"

"Cid likes to prepare?" Quistis said. "He spent, what, more than a decade prepping for Ultimecia? Building up Garden just for that?"

"So now he wants to prepare for Centra to get swallowed up by a massive sinkhole?" Zell flipped the down the top of her pack in disgust. "What can we do about that, anyway? Come on."

"Well," Quistis admitted. "He may know more than he's letting on. It does seem a little silly."

"We don't ask questions," Squall put in suddenly.

"What?" said Zell.

"We're SeeD," said Squall. "We do our jobs. No questions."

Zell looked at Quistis. Quistis looked at Zell.

Neither of them was really into contradicting Squall. Selphie might have said something. Rinoa might have gently hinted. Irvine might have at least offered a pensive and questioning look in Squall's general direction. But Zell and Quistis? They didn't have it in them to go against Squall.

Both of them had once had massive crushes on him, for one thing.

And for another: he was the leader. He'd just kind of effortlessly assumed the position. And he was more imposing than he knew. And he was right, actually. About SeeD, and what they were meant to do. That was how they had defeated Ultimecia and saved the world, right? No questions. Just getting the job done.

Squall fingered his gunblade.

"Typical Cid," he muttered. "We'll talk to him tomorrow."

* * *

"Oh, dear," Cid told his patient. "I didn't think they'd send this bunch."

His patient coughed up some blood in an effort to say: "Dollet."

"Soon," Cid said. "I'll find some way to distract them tomorrow morning; we'll get you out to Dollet while they're occupied."


	4. Chapter 4

They took the train to Deling City even though Selphie wanted to take the Ragnarok. Selphie always wanted to take the Ragnarok, actually, but they couldn't do that without attracting attention anymore. It was a highly conspicuous vehicle and they were highly conspicuous people. So Rinoa and Irvine talked Selphie down to train travel. She loved trains. She loved most things in the world. As the old Dolletian saying went: she danced with the joy of life.

Irvine was, by contrast, something of a secret sadsack. He couldn't quite understand her. That didn't mean he liked her any less. The Timberi frontier poet and sometime-chemist Reo Wenwist used to write extensively on this phenomenon—

(And cut Irvine some slack here; yes, he'd read the guy. He wasn't a nerd or anything, but he'd grown up poor in Deling City, unable to afford Tonberry Dust. So for the first few years of his life, he'd read. Mostly naughty magazines. But when he found himself in a library by some strange act of fate, then other stuff too, because libraries didn't stock naughty magazines.)

—and Wenwist described every interaction as a potential attraction of opposite charges. The more…Oh, Irvine was no poet. He figured you could call it opposite-y? The more opposite-y that the charges were? The more opposite-y they were, the more they attracted each other. This phenomenon wasn't simply for tiny particles and subcutaneous organisms. It applied all across the board, a law of Hyne. Opposite charges were attracted to each other. And Irvine and Selphie were opposites. Irvine had no inner joy to speak of, not any that wasn't a front; underneath his breezy airs and good looks he sometimes felt he was a negative, a big old void. While Selphie was brimming with positivity. It charged her up and made her a brilliant, happy, bouncing, energetic being; she couldn't even keep it inside her. Ergo, they'd bonded. She swapped him some of that joy for his…well. His something. Something was keeping her with him. Keeping up their bond.

It had been a bond formed in the cradle, Irvine thought. Matron said Irvine had been four months old when he'd come to the Orphanage. Selphie had already been there, a little older than him. And Matron hadn't confirmed that they'd hit it off right away, but Irvine didn't need the confirmation. He knew they had. He just knew it was true. He wasn't always the most intellectual soul, not even after reading all those books. But he was a secret romantic. And so some things he just took on faith.

See, aside from memories of Selphie and the orphanage; all Irvine had, really, were memories of being sort of empty and lonely by comparison. His childhood had been lonely. His training had been lonely. Even his first time had been lonely. Irvine had lost his virginity at almost fourteen, and he figured it had to have been loveless sex – not great sex, not yet; that would have been unrealistic. He'd been too young.

Bexley Kerr, 'Sir' to Irvine and 'Dad' according the adoption papers, would have rolled his eyes to hear of the event. Declared it typical, immoral, irresponsible, because Irvine was, in most respects, a complete failure and really a Bad Kid. There was the dullness to him, the secret sadness. There was a kind of failure to be upright and strong, a failure of masuclinity that no sexual exploit could make up for. And then later there would be womanizing, too; too many sexual exploits, like Irvine was setting out to be as shameful and low-class as possible. Though one had to know Irvine for about a month to figure out that it was a front – one small sliver of his personality that he'd blown out of proportion, just to keep people from seeing the rest of him.

But back to virginity. Almost fourteen. A Galbadian soldier – tall, for a woman, with bright eyes and powerful arms. She'd been guarding some diplomat who was meeting with Martine, only guarding him rather half-assedly, letting the guy wander the Garden while she herself sprawled on the couch in the waiting area, and there she'd seen Irvine, skinny but tall for his age, stewing because he'd been sent to the Headmaster's office. Again.

"You look like you're being held captive. What'd you do?" she'd asked.

And Irvine had said, "Nothing."

"Everybody says that," the soldier had said, waving a hand like she understood well the follies of youth. "If you'd done nothing, you wouldn't be here. You did something. Probably with a girl, right? Let some cute young thing into your heart, like a fool. And it went horribly wrong, I bet. You're at the age for it."

Irvine had, actually. The girl had been named Selphie Pardo when he'd known her and no one had ever told him who her adoptive parents had been, so he wouldn't have been able to track her down as a Tilmitt even if he'd tried to. That was how it had gone horribly wrong. Separate families, in the end; separate continents, even. And he'd been around three when he'd let her into his heart and first decided that he loved her, so it wasn't his fault. You weren't responsible for what you did at three. But he hadn't been about to protest or reveal that. Not to some random Galbadian soldier who was only flirting. Irvine had already understood flirting at the time; he'd been a quick learner.

Irvine had said, "No. I did nothing. Just nothing. No shooting people. No shooting grats, even. No GFs."

He'd been enrolled at Garden under extreme duress. Bexley had liked that they farmed their graduates out to the Galbadian army and had steamrolled over most of Irvine's protests.

The soldier had thought Irvine's natural squeamishness naïve, which it had been, and cute, which it hadn't been. So the first encounter was probably fairly uncomfortable; not enough to put Irvine off of sex completely, but somehow enough to make him shove the memory at the GFs, later on. He and the soldier had still exchanged contact information, and met near the Deling City Hotel for next three months, and she'd blown him beneath the underpass near the Presidential Palace.

Irvine couldn't remember her name.

He'd given the name up when he'd finally agreed to junction. And the memory of his actual first time. There were other memories he'd preferred to keep, things more important than an act he'd do again and again and only get better at. That was fine. Irvine had known he might lose stuff to the GFs.

Now, Irvine had told his friends that he hadn't junctioned GFs until meeting them. It wasn't strictly true. He hadn't junctioned for real battle until meeting them. He hadn't junctioned for especially long periods until meeting them. He hadn't junctioned enthusiastically, surrounded by the four of them, living reminders of a past that he was until then in danger of losing to the sway of the GFs, until meeting them. Meeting them had not been his first time. Er. His other first time. His GF first time.

Irvine had some previous experience with GFs; that was how he'd known they caused memory loss, right off the bat. He just hadn't wanted to admit how he'd known. It wasn't a terribly nice story. In the first place, it involved a lot of selfish forgetting. Not like Selphie and Zell and Quistis and Squall's inadvertent memory loss. But a deliberate, manipulative forgetting on Irvine's part.

And in the second place, it mostly revolved around how much of a lonely loser he'd been growing up. The story goes as follows:

The upper-level, more talented cadets at G-Garden had been weird and alien from the start. After a few months Irvine had realized why: they didn't have memories. Some lost their childhoods; parents were constant surprises they rediscovered in the mail every week. Others lost what they'd eaten the day before; they experienced for the first time the same Deling cafes over and over. And some lost their first memory of meeting Irvine, again and again, and looked at him strangely whenever he was familiar with them. And, with some pestering, an instructor finally took Irvine aside and told him why all this was happening.

GFs.

G-Garden didn't have many GFs. On paper, they had none, because Cid Kramer was paranoid about that stuff. Martine drilled it into them in case they ever came into contact with Cid's kids: "Don't let them know. Tell them we have none. "

Why?

Because GFs meant power. And when Cid down in Balamb caught wind that G-Garden had stumbled on some new source of power, he inevitably decommissioned that power for use by his own kids. He said it was because Galbadia Garden had always been meant to focus more on technology than magic. But GFs had their uses in the realm of technology, too. Some could help refine weapons components. Some, particularly those found in the desert near G-Garden, were like weapons – the magic one got from them was weak at best, but when they unfurled their bodies all one saw was a vast wall of mech. And some boosted physical strength and rolled out a shield against magic; these were particularly prized by Martine, as he saw in them the key to defeating Cid's kids, should it ever come to that.

Irvine had passed his physical tests perfectly, so if he could have been browbeaten into sticking to the program, he might have been a useful asset to Martine, might have been trained up to despise Cid and Cid's disciples. So Martine had come after him mercilessly for refusing to practice with their lone remaining GFs. Irvine had held out for a while. Then, he stumbled onto Florlina Drinnaks' _The Nature of the Summon_.

Not a naughty magazine, like most of his light reading. Just a book. But a useful one. Drinnaks saw GFs not as strange memory suckers that took up space in your brain. To her, they were more than that. They were almost people. GFs could think, apparently. They could be offended. They could challenge you, and judge you for being weak.

There was something to them, like with people.

Irvine wasn't good at getting close to people or making people really care about him; he only could charm them, keep their attention on him for temporary periods, that was all. But as a cadet he'd only junction the GFs for temporary periods. So that was all he needed. When, on pain of eternal detention, Martine had talked Irvine into letting one Zona Seeker into his brain, Irvine had taken a deep breath, cleared his mind completely (he'd run through this so many times in anticipation of junctioning that it was instinctive; it had to be), junctioned, and thought his first thoughts in the GF's direction.

"Don't take my memories."

Florlina Drinnaks said this almost never worked straight out. You had to be junctioned to them for a while, so that they obeyed your commands effortlessly, in order for it to work. And by then, of course, they would have already taken your memories – maybe even your memory that GFs could take memories.

Zona Seeker's physical form had a ribcage made of metal, and in its mental form its voice came forth sounding very tinny and mechanic and high for such a forbidding beast.

_What…are…memories?_

Right. Not promising.

"Like, my knowledge of what I did before now. For example, what I did this morning—"

And as soon as that had popped into his brain, there went his memory of the morning: no doubt brushing his teeth, pulling on his uniform, eating by himself in the caf. He still had the memory of the memory, of course. The knowledge that it had been there and he had done something. But the events themselves? Gone. Irvine had realized he would have to try a different tactic. What else did he have?

Oh. Gab. Charm.

"You seem like you're being held captive. What'd you do?"

_Are…you…mocking…me?_

_…_

_Fool!_

_Do…you…know…my…power?_

"Not as such," Irvine had thought evenly, making sure to keep calm. Breathe in, breathe out. He'd trained himself not to be nervous.

There was no reason to be, after all. He'd studied up on everything Florlina Drinnaks had to say about bargaining with GFs. So he was reasonably – reasonably – sure that he was on the right track. "I really wanna know. I can relate. I'm stuck here myself. At G-Garden, I mean. I don't wanna be here; you couldn't pay me to go into the Galbadian Army."

_…Coward._

Zona Seeker had been a fairly powerful GF, but no prize in the personality department.

"No, really," Irvine had thought. "We're gonna be stuck running drills together, aren't we? We might as well get to know each other. What's your story?"

_I…don't know._

"You don't need to get creative with it or anything. Just give me a name—"

_Zona Seeker…_

"Okay, not that. I already know that. Parents? Loved ones? GFs you're close to?"

_I….don't know._

"You don't have parents?" Irvine let slip a few memories of Bexley Kerr as a reference. And as bait.

_Bexley…_

_Very stern…_

_He was taller than me._

_Now he isn't anymore._

_I don't like him._

"Right," Irvine had thought. "Here's the thing. Bexley's not yours, my friend."

_He is!_

Florlina Drinnaks believed – correctly, as Irvine had come to discover – that something had made the GFs complete and total amnesiacs. They had few memories of their own, or else theirs were locked away somehow. GFs were straightforward creatures, and memory was, after all, not straightforward. It was your brain playing tricks on you. Imperfectly recreating something you could never get back. GF brains didn't work the same way. They couldn't recreate; they could only steal. Consequently they were all impulse; their identity was just whatever they happened to be feeling at the time; and what a lot of them felt was hungry for memories. For a better identity.

Why else would they help you so much, stick by you, once junctioned to you? If you kept them with you long enough, guided them into learning enough new abilities, they stole away so much of you in order to build themselves that after a while they almost thought they were you.

They didn't steal memories on purpose. They just came to believe your memories were really theirs.

Then had come the tricky part.

"Fine. He's yours. Tell me more about him," Irvine had thought. And had focused right away on his breathing. On the crack in the wall of the changing room in G-Garden's training center. On his fingernails. On the wool socks he'd taken off before drills and stuffed into his formal boots. On the athletic socks and regulation boots on his feet.

On anything but Bexley Kerr. It hadn't been easy. Like telling yourself not to think of pink geezards. You thought of them right away, unless you'd been forewarned, and in that case you tried to think of anything but.

_I…I can't._

_I don't know anything more._

He still couldn't think of Bexley, not yet. So Irvine had focused on the showerheads. He'd counted the holes in the nearest showerhead.

"Do…"

The tiles. Irvine sketched out a mental copy of the pattern on the tiles.

"You…"

The uneven wood bench, painted a dull G-Garden brick red. Irvine counted the grains in the wood.

"Want to…"

The pipes beneath the sinks. Irvine followed their loops from the sink to the wall, from the wall to the sink.

"Know…"

The creak of door as another trainee came in and headed for the lockers. Creak, creak, creak. Irvine had replayed it in his mind. GFs could only hit what you were thinking of right then. They couldn't go deeper. Thank Hyne.

"More?"

_Yes!_

So Irvine let it slip. Bexley Kerr, berating him. Bexley Kerr, offhandedly praising him. Bexley Kerr in Deling City, in the Desert, in his office at the D-District, where he oversaw prisoner transport. Bexley, Bexley, Bexley. Bexley explaining that he'd only adopted Irvine at the urging of his wife, Aurora Kinneas, and then Aurora (nice, pretty, joyful like Selphie; but Irvine didn't want to think too much about her, because he didn't want to risk losing her) had died in a prisoner riot, and Bexley had discovered Edea Kramer's no takebacks policy.

So they'd been stuck together. Bexley with the kid. Irvine with his (second) dead mom's surname, per Galbadia continent matrilineal custom. This was fine; he didn't want to be named after Bexley anyway.

_I do not wish to be named after him!_

_He hit me once!_

_He-_

_How did you do that?_

"That's a memory," Irvine had said. "Mine. Not yours. But it's delicious, right?"

_Filling._

_I am someone._

_I am you._

_We are connected._

And, Hyne damn him if it hadn't been weird, but at that Zona Seeker had sounded almost blissful. Mechanical voice notwithstanding.

"Do you want more?" Irvine had said. "I'm not stingy."

_Yes!_

"Alright. Let's work out a deal, then."

And that had been the start of the bargain. Nice memories? Zona Seeker could peek at them. But no claiming them. No taking them to wherever the hell it happened to store human-like thoughts, out of his reach. It could take the bad or distasteful ones whenever it felt like it, though. It wasn't like it minded. A bad identity was still an identity. And GFs didn't seem to conceive of 'bad' and 'good' the same way normal people did, anyway.

All the same, this was why Irvine figured his first time must not have been particularly good. He couldn't quite remember it. But he could remember telling Bismarck – the second GF he ever junctioned – that little Sefie from the orphanage was off-limits, but this chick? The soldier here? She didn't mean much. It had been an empty experience. Whatever her name was.

Irvine could remember knowing her name, at this point. But he couldn't remember the name itself.

_You have lost things. We make you lose them. This is why I cannot take your memories,_ recited Siren, in the present.

Irvine went over this with her every time he junctioned her. Once they left you, the GFs couldn't retain much. They went back to being all impulse. Sometimes they took your lost memories with them, which really worried him, especially since it was a useless endeavor; they couldn't seem to access them once outside the human brain.

"This," Irvine reminded her, "Is why you can't take without asking first. Unless it's bad. Or useless. Pain. One night stands. That kind of thing."

Selphie, verifying their train passes with the station attendant, turned to look at him. She knew by now that he bargained with the GFs in his mind. Irvine could see her making a face at Rinoa about it; she was torn over it. On the one hand, Irvine often took a long long time standing there talking with his GFs, and it seemed to take something out of him. She told him that she'd always just accepted GFs, hadn't worried about memory loss, and she'd been fine. No bargains needed. It seemed to her like a lot of unnecessary stress that Irvine was throwing on himself.

But on the other hand, Selphie hated not knowing things. She was determined to learn and master his GF-bargaining trick on principle, even if she was doing fine with storing memories in her online diary and even if she could never seem to clear her head the way he could. Teaching her was uphill going. Particularly since every time she asked after the memories he traded away to his GFs, he had to come up with something other than 'recollections of my asshole father' and 'people I have slept with who aren't you.'

_You think you will forget the one night stands anyway_, Siren noted, skimming the surface of his thoughts.

"Well, and also it's good for me not to have them," thought Irvine. "People asking for paternity tests, that kind of thing."

Since he thought of paternity tests, Siren thought of paternity tests, and understood for the first time what they were, and then she sent him a flash of disapproval – she was a very human GF in more ways than her form. She didn't need to get really verbal and specific, so much as project her emotions at you in a judgey way if she damn well felt like it.

"I always submit to the paternity tests! Sometimes I pay for them. And none of them has ever come back positive," Irvine protested.

Irvine was a big believer in just about every form of contraception under the sun. He was a good Garden boy like that.

"Don't take my memories of how to use contraceptives," he warned Siren. "I need those."

_But you did not need the name of your first love._

"Right," Irvine thought. "What? No. Not a love. Just a woman."

The insinuation that he might have loved someone other than Selphie stunned him; he didn't like it. He actually started, right there in the station, and Rinoa, who was buying magazines from the platform seller, caught sight of this and raised an eyebrow.

_How would you know?_ said Siren smugly. _You traded away your memories of her._

"That's exactly why she can't be my love," Irvine argued. This was the problem with Siren. No identity didn't mean no personality. And her personality was even worse than Zona Seeker's had been.

_Perhaps it ended poorly, and you removed the wounds she left._

Oh, now there was a disturbing thought.

_Yes. I think so as well._

"I don't even know her name," said Irvine.

Only then, suddenly, he did.

_Rill Tremlett_, Siren noted.

It had flashed across his mind very unexpectedly. Because it was on the cover of the magazine Rinoa had bought. She'd bought more than a few. And one, one of the gossip rags that had sprung up in the wake of the war to pollute the old Timber Maniacs market, came with the headline:

**Garden Sharpshooter: Loose and Lurid?  
Former Lover Rill Tremlett Tells All!**

The rest of the cover was a pastiche of photos: a photo of Rill; some blurry pictures of Irvine in FH, "terrorizing the locals"; and a brief caption that noted that he was supposed to be dating Trabia Garden survivor and fellow hero Selphie Tilmitt. Supposed to be. But he probably wasn't being faithful, was the insinuation. There was also a photo of a teenage Irvine in the lower left, near the pricing mark. Teenage Irvine wasn't wearing very much. In small red letters, the magazine promised more inside. But probably not any more clothes.

"Fucking Hyne," Irvine said, too stunned to say anything more.

"You should see the ones about me," Rinoa muttered.

Selphie caught up to them by this point. She grabbed the magazines out of Rinoa's hands. She said, furiously, "Trabia Garden Survivor Selphie Tilmitt. Homeless Refugee Selphie Tilmitt. Poor Little Mourning Selphie Tilmitt. Adel's Tits! Why do you buy this stuff?"

"I want to know what they're saying about me," Rinoa said defensively.

Irvine still hadn't found any words.

He was pretty sure he was thirteen in that one picture of him.

Sure, people said stuff, and had been saying stuff about him all his life. But this. This was—this was—

Siren put it better than he could have. _Can I have this memory? The one you're laying the groundwork for right now?_

_I ask only because it doesn't seem to be shaping up to be a good one._

* * *

Selphie had once loved trains, but now she hated them.

Trains meant traveling incognito. Why? Because suddenly everybody knew who they were, because they'd gone and unthinkingly saved the world, and there were reporters everywhere. In her parents' yard in Trabia. At destroyed Trabia Garden. In Esthar. Everywhere but B-garden, really, since Xu didn't tolerate the press coming onto Garden without an invite and had resorted to creative means to drive them away (dangerous cadet drills near the exits, and "escaped" malboros and stuff).

Irvine and Rinoa said the Ragnarok was conspicuous? Please.

They were conspicuous. Them. Selphie, Irvine, Rinoa, Squall, Quistis, Zell. Wherever they went, people were suddenly interested in knowing everything about them and making it up when they didn't know. Photographers had taken to stalking the Garden cars when it seemed like one of the group might be traveling. This, predictably, interfered with their missions. And had led to Xu practically throwing their week of vacation time in their faces as soon as she could spare them; there were only so many paparazzi invasions the Headmistress could deal with.

Fine. Whatever, as Squall would say. They'd take vacations. They'd make themselves scarce, practically invisible. Rinoa would remove her trademark highlights and chop off half her hair, swap her clothes. Irvine and Selphie would do the same; the latter no longer a byword for flashy desert menswear, instead traveling in a simple cap and black slacks, and the former would wear boring green pants instead of her pretty yellow dress.

But people still squinted at them on the station platform like they could figure out who they were. And pestered them like they were entitled to know everything about them. Honestly, why had they bothered saving the world anyway? Now the world wouldn't leave them alone. The world sucked.

As if to punctuate this, the train shuttered into the station rather pitifully, seeming pathetic after Esthar's superior airship technology. Selphie shoved the magazines under her arm wrathfully, and said, "Let's board. You can look at these once we're in our car."

She strode off, practically tossing their tickets at the conductor. Rinoa and Irvine dutifully followed.

"Can I—" Irvine said, as soon as they were inside. He seemed flustered. "Can I—um. One of those. I need to see it."

"I wish they'd stop writing about your ex-girlfriends," Selphie told him, a little ruthlessly. She sorted through the magazines for whichever one had his name. "I like to pretend you never ever had any other lovers. Ever." She itched to blow something up. Truth was – when you were furious, nothing blew off steam better than the Ragnarok's high-octane flight and ability to withstand explosions. Their journey fighting Ultimecia had taught her that. But all around them there was nothing to blow up. Nothing but train, and you couldn't blow up a train when you were riding on it. "I mean, I know you did have lovers. But I'm more jealous and spiteful than I ever thought I was. And when I think about them I want to kill them. So, you know. Pretend."

Ah. There it was. Another jilted ex for Irvine. Another sleazy headline. Another—wait.

Oh, Hyne. Irvy.

"How old are you in this picture?" Selphie said.

"Young," Irvine said uncomfortably.

Selphie handed the magazine over. Rinoa caught sight of it as she did so.

"I'm sorry," she said quickly. "I didn't notice that picture when I— I mean. The first article really upset me. These do too. But I just buy them all now, as a matter of habit, almost, so—"

"It's fine," Irvine said quickly. "It's not like you printed the thing."

But someone had. Someone had seen quick cash in it and gone right ahead. And someone – something Tremlett, from what Selphie could read from here; Irvine was scanning the article anxiously and had part of the headline blocked off with his hand – had taken the picture in the first place, and then delivered it to the papers.

Something Tremlett was a dead woman.

Selphie was going to hunt her down and blow her up. Lots of times. In small pieces. After she cut off the pieces. After she beat her black and blue.

"Can I see it when you're done?" she asked Irvine. "Not – not if you're not comfortable."

He brought the magazine down and looked at her for a good few seconds. She couldn't read his expression; that was one of the things she liked least about him. She could never really read Irvy's expression. Not anymore, anyway. Not since he was, like, five. Selphie vaguely remembered him being a lot more open at age five.

"Sure," he said eventually. "Let me finish first, though."

Then the magazine went back up, blocking his face. While she waited for him to finish, Selphie arranged the others on the floor. Just to get a good look at them all: the full picture. Then she could plan. They had to do something about their level of media exposure. They'd been ignoring it, hoping it would blow over. She'd been ignoring it. A longtime fan of gossip news for years, Selphie had found herself suddenly retreating, uncomfortable, from the world's magazines and newspapers for the past seven months. Firstly because it was weird to see herself listed there alongside the Card Queen and other genuine media personalities. And secondly because she hadn't seen any reason to keep tabs on this stuff; she herself hadn't even been a major target until recently, not like Squall or Rinoa.

For a few reasons. 1) Selphie was friends with most people; most people didn't have anything really bad to say about her. 2) Selphie was largely considered the member of the group with the saddest backstory, a genuine Trabia Garden survivor, entitled to moments of private mourning (the assumption was that she was always mourning; the public didn't like to think of her not mourning; that would have been tasteless of her). And 3) Selphie was actually, once you got your hands on video footage of her limit breaks, downright terrifying.

But then the foundations of the new Trabia Garden were unveiled. And suddenly, quite without warning, the papers had decided they needed to revive their mourning heroine.

**Selphie Smiles (Through Her Tears?)  
"Tilmitt Has Already Moved On!" Says Trabia Refugee, Of Callous Classmate  
Tilmitt Seeks Solace From Tragedy In Arms Of Garden Womanizer  
"Our Selphie Will Never Heal The Hole In Her Heart," Say Trabia Friends**

Selphie had always been a big believer in the freedom of the press. She collected Timber Maniacs, after all. She had several blog posts up about the revolutionary role the paper had played in shaping the politics of the Galbadian continent. She didn't hate free speech, not really.

She just hated that her grief – and her boyfriend, apparently – were now public property.

Rinoa had it even worse. Half of the world despised her on principle: she was a sorceress. Of the other half, Galbadia despised her because she was an open supporter of Timber independence; and Timber hated her because it had come out that she'd been raised on General Caraway's dime. Winhill had suddenly taken a proprietary interest in Squall. So they hated her because she was, according to the Deling City Mirror, not nearly good enough for him. And Dollet's gays and lesbians rather liked her: sorceresses, as social outcasts, had long been cultural icons for some of that set. And Rinoa had always shown them support anyway. But, judging by the letters to the editor published in the Dollet Daily Press after their **Heartilly: Doomed to Become Ultimecia?** article, absolutely everyone else in Dollet felt it was irresponsible of Garden not to kill her where she stood.

In light of all this, it was slightly understandable that she'd started to collect all the print media she could lay her hands on. It gave her some inkling of where the next death threats were going to roll in from.

Squall had it nearly as bad. Sure, some of the world still looked at him as a hero. But the truth was: he didn't have what it took to be a media darling. He just didn't. Squall's personality was 85% rude silence, 13% cutting remarks, 2% unthinkingly throwing over everything else in his life for his girlfriend. And the world was starting to catch on. Timber, which was grudgingly in favor of him because Galbadia hated him, was starting to put out articles like: **Does Leonhart Hinder the Cause of Timber Independence?** Squall was only tangentially connected to Timber independence; he was the Garden muscle that happened to be dating its driving force. But that was more than nothing. And they had a point. He had a tendency to piss off Galbadian diplomats over nothing. He had a wry rejoinder for every oblique insult, and dished up stubborn silence when it came time to negotiate. Squall was a terrific Commander. But not a very good politician.

The rest of the Galbadia continent feared that he'd team up with Laguna to conquer them. Some reporter had discovered the connection between Squall and Laguna three months ago, and now no one would stop talking about it. Except, of course, Squall. Squall wouldn't go near Esthar if you offered him a million gil. Xu had actually done this by attempting to assign him many a mission there, only to have rank pulled on her and the missions flatly denied.

For their part, the Esthar populace were beginning to suspect that Squall would be making overtures at Galbadia in an attempt to conquer them. Esthar had very free press laws. So the Esthar Independent, with no one from Laguna's office moving to stop them, had published a hugely popular op-ed arguing that Squall might any day now wrench the Estharian presidency away from his father. The thrust of it seemed to be that Squall wanted retaliation for all those years Laguna had been a deadbeat dad. The Independent intimated that Laguna had maybe abandoned his son deliberately (which was untrue. Sir Laguna would never), and probably deserved it. But ultimately the paper had concluded that the father would be a better president than the son. Laguna was cheery and approachable. Squall was grim and threatening.

Irvine, of course, had all those newspaper articles on his sexual dalliances. When he handed the latest over so that Selphie could add it to her pile, she got to check that – yes – they still believed him to be currently sleeping his way across the Esthar continent. Still likely possessed of every sexual disease under the sun. Almost certainly in your backyard, about to seduce your son and daughter. To read it, Irvine was a worldwide menace, a sexual threat putting the world on high alert, and besides this, like the rest of them, he seemed arrogant, too aware of his role as a world hero. And he'd made no friends at G-Garden, which was suspicious and pointed to severe deficiencies in his character. His own father, claimed the paper, was reputed to dislike him.

Quistis' parents, by contrast, had informed the Fisherman's Horizon Gazette that they were very proud of her. They'd also had their pictures taken in the Dollet Inquirer, and had won a lucrative contract with the now-functioning Dollet radio tower to talk about her every Sunday from three to four. They chided her publicly for her clothing choices and failure to send home enough of her paycheck, described in detail her extreme beauty and sad, sad luck with men, generally waxed rhapsodic about their close family connection to her; and despaired that perhaps she was making the wrong friends. They didn't seem to approve of the rest of the group: all rude people and loose men and sorceresses. This was probably why Quistis never, ever, ever mentioned them to her friends or coworkers; and in fact lived life as though her parents did not exist.

Which didn't stop them from snagging the cover of this week's Timber Times: **"My Beautiful Daughter Needs A Man!" Cries Mrs. Trepe. "Sometimes I Worry That She's Frigid!"**

Of all of them, only Zell had really escaped the media blitz. Balamb had run a local interest piece on him right after the war. But Balamb was an unpretentious town; it had just been a brief note underneath his picture at some long-ago birthday party, approximately age eight. It had been squished onto on page three of the weekly broadsheet. **Our Zell Dincht Of Main Street Who Helped Save The World Last Week; Good For Him! Mother Is Proud**. And the Trabia Chronicle had listed him as one of the B-Garden alums who'd dropped by to support the rebuilding a few months ago. But aside from that, the papers seemed to think he was a nice Balamb boy, enormously boring, not particularly threatening, with no great tragedies in his past, unlikely to snap and kill his biological parents in a bloody coup; and, worst of all, not even dating anyone. One of the smaller news sources out in Dollet had run an article on him and the Library Girl last week. Zell's mother had written them a strongly worded note as soon as the edition hit the streets, they'd published it and apologized, and the whole thing seemed to have died down. Zell hadn't even had to change his appearance much. People genuinely had no idea he was that Zell Dincht, even with Zell Dincht being an extremely rare name.

Zell didn't make a single showing in anything Rinoa had collected from the newsstands.

How did he do it?

"Zell's looking good this week," Irvine said, looking at the spread on the floor. "I'm almost jealous."

Irvine didn't look shaken, but he must have been. He had to be.

"The perks of being well-adjusted and boring," Selphie told him, trying to comfort him.

"Zell's just a very good person," Rinoa said. She patted Angelo distractedly – Angelo always traveled with her. People didn't like telling her she couldn't take her dog on trains because she was a sorceress and sorceresses tended to be terrifying, so here the dog was. Rinoa added, "If we're going to gossip about him, I'd prefer that we be kind about it." But then she crouched down to get a better look and saw that a publication in Trabia, of all places, was declaring her **The Terror of Timber**. So she added, "It must be nice for him to not be a sorceress, though."

"He's also not as good looking as you," Selphie told Irvine.

"Probably really wonderful for him to have parents who are completely un-military and have never once tried to take over other countries," said Rinoa.

"And his friends are all alive," Selphie said.

"And you'd think people would make more noise about him, because everyone knows him," said Irvine.

"That is so annoying," said Selphie, hypocritically getting into the swing of things. "I hate people like that."

"No one ever forgets about him," Irvine said. "It's like: oh, there's Zell. Can't miss Zell."

"Hometown boy, Zell," said Selphie, "Totally Still Has An Intact Hometown Zell."

"Has A Living Mother Who Loves Him Zell," said Rinoa.

"Team player, Zell!" said Irvine. "No Trouble Relating To People, Zell!"

"That's wasted on him," Rinoa pointed out, "Because he never uses his social ability for political good. I mean, you don't see him liberating Balamb—"

Fun as the rag-on-Zell session was, here Selphie felt she had to be objective.

"In his defense, only like one person's ever ever tried to take over Balamb. All you'd gain would be SeeDs for neighbors, some pet Fastitocalons, and a lot of fish. It would be more of a headache to control than Timber, and is less strategically beneficial than FH."

"Still!" Rinoa said, tracing **Terror of Timber** with one pale blue nail. "They invited him to be on the Balamb Municipal Committee! To be a force for change! And do you know what he said?"

"'No, thanks. Cuts in on my T-boarding time,'" Irvine said.

"Zell!" Rinoa finished glumly.

There was silence for a minute. The silence meant they had time for a little bit of guilt to sneak into their minds.

"Okay, he probably didn't deserve that," Rinoa said. She got up and sat back in her seat, looking sheepish.

"Yeah. It just felt nice," said Selphie.

"Still," said Irvine, "Now that we've gotten the Seifer Almasy out…"

That did more to make them all feel guilty than the silence ever had. Because Zell was a very good person. And well-adjusted. And beloved by his parents. Just a lucky guy all around, really. And it was only deeply troubled, arrogant assholes that picked on him; everybody knew that. Deeply troubled, arrogant assholes who somehow escaped completely the consequences of their actions. And who, after a few headlines spotting them fishing in FH and a few op-eds calling for their death, had faded from the newspapers completely.

"Now there's a disappearing act," Selphie muttered.

"Now there's cosmic unfairness," said Rinoa. "If anybody should be called a Terror of Anything—"

"Everything, actually," said Irvine. "I mean, he had his good qualities as a kid, but Terror of Everything is a more accurate way of getting the—" Here he waved offhandedly at some spectral Seifer Almasy sitting in the corner of the train car, no doubt smirking at them and thrilled to be the topic of conversation and the star of all their resentful nightmares, "General personality across."

He was also, randomly, Rinoa's ex-boyfriend. Kinda. More or less. After losing touch with her, he'd gone completely crazy, betrayed the Garden that had raised him, and tried to feed her to the evil sorceress Adel. This explained the vitriol in Rinoa's voice when she next spoke.

"I hate it. It's so unjust. He vanishes, and deals with none of the fallout. And we deal with all of it! I don't want to talk about him," Rinoa said. She stood very suddenly and seemed to make up her mind about something. She picked up the magazines and very deliberately crumpled them into small balls, one by one. "Do. Not. Want. To. Let's just not. Let's go back to Zell. Zell is nice. The world is a better place for having lots of Zells. And few Seifer Almasys."

She lined the crumpled magazine balls up on the seat next to her; incidentally right in the place Irvine had waved at. Then she very methodically pointed a finger at each one in turn. And, in turn, each one exploded into blue flames.

Selphie looked at Irvine. Irvine looked at Selphie. Angelo looked at both of them, then whined and covered her face with a paw.

"Alright, Rinoa, whatever you want," Irvine said carefully.

Seifer Almasy was probably better saved for Rinoa's therapy sessions anyway.

At least, Selphie hoped Rinoa was getting therapy. Selphie was. Doctor K, three times a week. But they all needed it. All of them. Not a single psychologically sound one in the group. Not even Zell, probably, when you factored in the years of bullying and the snide commentary he still had to suffer through from even his own friends. F-minuses on the psych evals all around.

"We have so many problems," Selphie muttered.

Irvine looked at her assessingly. Selphie still couldn't tell what he was thinking. "Sure you're not buying into the bad press?" he said.

But she wasn't, not really. They did have problems, every single one of them. Only, now that they were heroes, those problems became magnified and were broadcast to the world.

* * *

"You can keep a low profile when you get to Dollet, right?" said Cid. "I know your connections there are…not very low-profile, but—"

His patient coughed, but there was less blood in it than there had been before. This comforted Cid.

"Anyway, like I said, I'll distract the kids," Cid said. "You stay here. Get ready. I'll throw them off. Then we'll get you to Dollet."

* * *

Raijin floated in and out of his own head.

He wasn't sure what they'd done to him. Some kind of liquid magic. Some injection. And it meant that there were parts of him that weren't a part of him anymore. They were visiting strange places, horrible places: a great castle, a factory where exhausted men and women were worked on great machines, the laboratories of the city of Esthar.

Someone called him back. He wished it was Fujin, but it wasn't Fujin; it was a girl with gold in her eyes and silver paint on her dark skin. A sorceress.

Raijin screamed.


	5. Chapter 5

March 18th. Centra.

They planned to see Cid at sunrise. Just to keep him on his toes and remind him that these were SeeDs he'd raised, not children he could dismiss on a whim. But then he showed up a minute before they finished packing up camp and heading out of the orphanage. Looking only slightly apologetic. And so familiar. And so fatherly.

And in any case his eternal unreliability was just so _Cid_ of him.

Quistis saw him first, and good thing too, because who knew whether Squall and Zell would be able to keep their heads about it.

"That wasn't very nice, Cid," she told him warningly. "Squall was so excited to see you."

Cid stared at her.

"Well," she relented, "As excited as Squall gets."

Cid nodded pensively.

"I picked the right person for Commander," he said, after a moment.

Quistis bit her tongue. He'd picked the only person for Commander. It wasn't so much that he liked Squall – she'd had to defend Squall to him more than once while acting as Squall's instructor – it was more that Squall had been trapped in time compression. He'd shown up years ago to cue in Cid's wife about the possibility of malevolent future sorceresses, and so sometime in the past decade or so Cid had come around to the idea that Squall was destined to be Garden's next true leader.

"Look at you, all in purple," Cid said, jumping to a new topic with no rational explanation for why.

Cid did this often. He was disarming like that. You had to be very secure in yourself and not easily thrown off to deal successfully with him, which was why people like Xu and Squall made good administrative foils for Cid. Quistis, not so much. She'd passed her SeeD test and made the youngest instructor in the history of Garden, and then spent endless faculty meetings feeling off-balance as Cid danced around practically every point he really wanted to make.

She usually nodded along like she had no problem with this. She was too much of a people-pleaser (which in her mind she termed professionalism, but really it was people-pleasing: a need to be liked) to head Cid off and force him to talk straight. It wasn't in her character.

"This Dollet radio show said my old outfit looked like bondage gear," she told Cid.

"That's not very nice," Cid said. "I always thought you seemed so confident. And also you made me feel nervous, like I might need to beat up people who got very fresh."

"The point was more to show that I could beat up people who got very fresh," said Quistis. "And to dare them to get fresh, so I could prove it."

It had been, too.

If Quistis was going to go through life insecure and off-balance, then at least she could use that. She could figure out how to turn it on others. At some point, probably while her not-parents harangued her for some imperfect score on something, she'd begun to understand that her feelings of insecurity made no sense; she really was good enough. Intellectually, she knew she was. She was attractive, fast, strong, smart – everything people were supposed to be, really. Only just below the intellectual level, somewhere in the dark and chaotic id, she could never quite convince herself of it. So she faked it. All the better to disarm people. She had to have picked something up from Cid, after all. He was her very first father figure.

"See? So confident. I knew I picked the right person for Instructor," Cid said.

Picked and subsequently fired. But hey, why quibble?

Actually, Quistis sort of wanted to quibble. She wanted to make him feel as uncomfortable as she felt. In the past seven months, she'd been trying something new. It was: Stop Beating Yourself Up And Do Whatever You Want. Selphie had cued her into it. Selphie was like a little sister to Quistis, and therefore the teaching should have run in the other direction. But she was also Quistis's psychological opposite, all unbridled confidence and a complete lack of apology for anything, and as a result Selphie's life always seemed so refreshing. So perfect. Selphie had probably never had a crush on Squall Leonhart; Selphie was too together to romanticize people like that. Selphie had probably never hung out with people who bored her; Selphie had her pick of friends, and few overly-aggressive groupies.

And Selphie would have told Cid to shove it where the sun didn't shine.

Selphie would have made Cid as off-balance as he made her.

Almost without thinking, almost for no reason at all, just as an impulse, it slipped out: "What are you hiding about the Kashkabald, Cid?"

Cid, who'd been clearly about to brush right past her and head into the orphanage, stopped short.

"It must be bothering you if you're being that direct about it," he said. "That's not like you."

In for a gil, in for a full-blown weapons upgrade.

"Answer the question."

Cid sighed. He brought his hand to the bridge of his nose and pinched it.

"You…have to see it," he confessed. "I thought they would send some junior SeeDs, actually. This would go more smoothly with junior SeeDs. You're all so high profile now. Magazine covers and radio shows—"

"That's irrelevant—" And also she didn't particularly want to talk about the details there. "We're here now. If you're trying to get us to go back to Garden to demand Xu put new people on it; we can't. Pulling strings like that is hardly in line with Garden procedure. You devised the system; you know this isn't how this works. So stop jumping around and just tell me."

Cid brought a hand to the back of his neck, uneasy.

"Aaah, tell you what?" he said. "I'll meet you there. The Egabi Crater. Four hundred meters due west from the southernmost reach of Almaj into the desert. Oh-seven-hundred."

Quistis raised an eyebrow. Why couldn't he just say it? And, besides that – "It's not going to take us an hour and a half to get there!"

"Edea's in Trabia," Cid said, apropos of nothing. "She thinks she owes them for—well. You know. I should check in with her before I do anything today."

Then he was off, surprisingly fast for a man of his age (a kind of eternal middle age; he'd seemed middle aged for as long as Quistis had known him; even those memories she could pull from her GFs revealed him as rounding about the midsection and graying fast at the temples). Whenever Cid wanted to vanish, vanish he did.

Someone behind her cleared their throat. Quistis whirled around. Squall. He didn't say anything – he usually didn't. The throat clearing was clearly just to alert her to the fact that he'd been there, watching.

So now she felt embarrassed. She couldn't help herself. In the moment, facing down Cid, she'd felt wonderfully liberated. No longer Garden's top good girl, professional to the core, taking orders like a champ, dishing orders as expected. But someone who could think and push and challenge: a glorious rebel. It had felt good. She'd never suspected that jumping outside your role, disregarding the questions you were supposed to be asking instead of the ones that you wanted to ask, could feel so good. Sometimes Quistis got snappy with people, edged around and toyed with the idea of disrespecting them, just to jump outside herself for a minute, just to show that she was more than her fame and her role. But that was more for show than anything else, like her old mission gear. It was false confidence. And she only ever exercised it on people she knew she could get away with snapping at: people who wouldn't mind, or else people who were rebellious and egotistical and overconfident themselves and wouldn't notice.

Never at the Headmaster.

It wasn't good SeeD behavior. Under Squall's gaze, she understood this. And felt ashamed. She felt ashamed a lot, actually; often for no particular reason, for failing to completely understand where some cadet was coming from, for being scrutinized by the Trepies all the time, for thinking she could fool the world into believing her to be a competent and confident young woman. That moment with Cid had been a nice vacation from all that shame. But it was over now.

It made no sense that Squall was always a trigger for this shame. Squall was, and had always been, fairly unrepentant himself. But she'd always been fond of him. She tried to unravel all her memories of him now, but it was hard going, because the Brothers and Diablos both were in her brain. Still, she caught a few threads. She knew that once she'd been jealous of the attention he gave Ellone. She knew that she'd wanted to be Ellone, almost. Older and poised and in charge. And Squall represented what you could have if you were like that. The complete and total adoration and attention of someone like him, someone who barely gave anyone the time of day otherwise.

You could be special.

Quistis had people telling her she was special all the time. But the truth was? She'd never really felt it, not a day in her life, not for as long as she could remember. And sure, her memory was patchy. But deep in her bones, she suspected and feared that if she could go back and pull every memory out of every GF that had ever taken one from her, she still wouldn't find a single one in which she'd been really happy with herself.

Zell came up behind Squall at this point. He sort of squinted at the two of them – they were, after all, standing here in silence, gathering up the dust Cid had kicked off when he'd run back to his house.

"We should—" he began.

"We're going to the Kashkabald," Squall said shortly. "Cid is going to meet us there at oh-seven-hundred. We'll take some time to look around before he catches up. He seems like he's hiding something."

"Sure, what else is new?" Zell complained. He ducked back inside to gather up their supplies.

The wave of shame came on stronger. She'd done the wrong thing. They could have interrogated Cid together, the three of them. Or they could have gotten the mission details from him cut-and-dry, pulled them out of him easily with Squall's direct manner and magic touch, and discovered nothing odd was going on. They could have done anything but what she'd done, which was clearly the wrong thing to have done, because she'd been the one to do it. And she never knew what she was doing. Not really.

"Good work," Squall said. He turned and went in after Zell. Elaborating on the point wasn't really his style.

But the compliment didn't make her feel any better. She'd focused in on him, more than once, as some kind of barometer to measure herself by, or else as her living curaga, the one person whose attention could heal her insecurity. But when he offered her any attention, it hit her like a wave breaking on the shore, receding right away and leaving only the smallest particles of comfort behind.

She carried her insecurity with her. She wished it were like a memory, that she could shove it at some GF and be done with it. But it was in her bone-deep, more than any single instance or recollection: just the sum of her by now.

* * *

The healer was named Farica Mossgrove. She was a sorceress. Her patient didn't trust her. This caused her no small amount of consternation. Her experiences with sorcery were very unlike Rinoa Heartilly's and she wasn't used to people mistrusting her. Then again, she wasn't nearly as powerful as Heartilly.

Also, she was only fifteen.

She had an older sister who would come by to snipe as she worked on Raijin.

"There's no real justice in this place," said her sister.

Farica looked at her with resigned golden eyes. She'd been made sorceress very young, so cosmic injustice was a thing she well understood. She said, mildly, "Don't let anyone hear you saying that."

Raijin was a very big young man, but he gave her no trouble due to his size because restraining him with magic was as easily as breathing. The trouble came in the fact that they'd been messing about with magic of the most destructive kind, magic of the mind. And so she could see very clearly that sometimes Raijin wasn't in his body at all, but in other places, and in those moments he was very, very lucky that her magic, while not especially great, did have some highly specialized uses. Namely, retrieval.

Some girls could send minds whirling into different spheres, different bodies, different time zones, even.

Farica couldn't do that. She wasn't that skilled. She could only bring them back.

The problem was that every time she tried, she gave Raijin a terrible fright. She was, like most sorceresses, not exactly inconspicuous. Her riotous curls contained enough elaborate headpieces to outfit ten sorceresses and her red dress was perhaps more suited to a sorceress ten years older.

"Plus, they took his sister, and the other one," remarked her sister, Renata.

Renata was useless by most people's standards, because she lacked completely any propensity for magic. This was fairly rare. Where Raijin came from, an odd place, a half-dream, maybe, that he had a tendency to begin babbling about at odd moments (though never dropping anything useful), people liked to believe that the sorceress power was a rare curse.

But Farica's people had always celebrated it as a rather common blessing. And as she didn't have it, Renata had grown up slightly odd, very rebellious, nowhere near as calm and genteel as her sister.

"Not the other one. The Knight," Farica told her gently.

To be a Knight was no small thing, even a failed Knight. And in fact most Knights were failed Knights. Iseult Neve, Wrolf Gunner, Jana Ki, Undine Meri. All had failed. But this didn't mean one shouldn't respect them; they'd been sorceress-touched, elevated. One had to acknowledge that.

And this new Knight was a bit more special than all those others. He was tall. He had a wide mouth, a knightly jaw, golden hair. And even without all that, he'd been sorceress-touched by the greatest sorceress in all the world. One who, temporarily, had completely obliterated the rules of time. No other had ever come so close. Only Ultimecia.

"His name's Seifer," Renata said, rolling her eyes. "Not that it matters much at this point, after what they did to him."

As if in response, Raijin shifted violently on his cot. Farica gave her sister a warning glance.

Renata was opposed to the status quo. She had sympathy for every wretched prisoner, devoured incendiary literature, took on herself the perspective of the criminal to better understand him. But she, like most people, couldn't follow through. She only decried what had been done to Seifer Almasy in private. She burned the incendiary literature as soon as she'd read it. And she performed her job as prisoners' warden as instructed, for all that she claimed she wanted to free her charges. And so, even if Farica had agreed with her on every point, she still would have found her sister to be only a would-be revolutionary, worthy of contempt.

Sister. There might be the key. If she could have the sister waiting here, their prisoner might be glad to see her and he might tempted to stay in his own head.

"The girl they brought in with him?" Farica said.

Renata rolled her eyes, reached into her pocket, lit a cigarette (which she knew Farica hated). Then she said, "His sister, Fujin."

"Didn't look like him," Farica put in, wanting to be sure Renata had her facts right.

"He called her his sister when he was being tortured," Renata said.

"Interrogated."

"Tortured," said Renata. "He said, 'My sister!' It was pretty clear. Maybe she was his half-sister or something. Fuck Hyne if I know."

She said that last bit in a lower voice. It was wrong to wish ill on Hyne and she knew it. Farica wrinkled her nose in disgust and disappointment to hear her say it.

"The girl's dead," Renata said, blowing smoke in her face. "Gone. Bye bye, sister."

Farica stared at her. There went her plan! And the sister had seemed strong, too. And had someone informed the Commissioner? Would she have to inform the Commissioner? That didn't seem fair. Just because someone had gone and worked a criminal to death.

"Then what am I supposed to do?" Farica said, miserably. "I can't tell this one that. He won't come back at all if he finds out his sister's dead. And if he doesn't come back, then—"

"Well, then maybe someone shouldn't have shot his veins clear through with that noxious toxin," Renata said, with faux-agreeability.

Farica was extremely tempted to hit her with an offensive spell, only she wasn't particularly good at offensive spells, so she didn't bother. She just buried her head in her hands.

"Well, I'd say to bring in his friend…" Renata began.

Farica hit her. It was very sudden; Renata hadn't been expecting it. Also, since Farica had very long nails, it hurt. Renata grimaced and put a hand to the spot on her arm that now boasted three scratches, long and red.

"You know I can't bring Sir Almasy in!" Farica said.

"Of course you can't. He's not here anymore," Renata told her.

This, Farica felt, was a dig at her. Even though it wasn't, not really. It was a dig at everyone in their lives, and Farica was only collateral damage. Renata had no way of knowing that Farica had found Seifer Almasy exciting, bold, had liked the flash in his eyes. Now that all this had vanished, she was saddened. A little girl deprived of a crush.

"He probably won't settle back in his head because you have no Hyne-damned bedside manner," Renata said. "Tell you what? When I come off patrol, I'll sit with this prisoner you have. Coax him back into his head. 'Course, they'll only torture him again."

"Yes, but they won't punish me," Farica said.

"Fair enough," Renata said easily.

* * *

Garden transports were fast. They were designed to be inconspicuous and quick, to strike like lightning. So they made it to the Southern shores near the Kashkabald with time to spare, and in fact with their hour and a half, they could have jumped across the world to Deling City and still been back in time to meet Cid.

"He's given us no info," Zell said. "Do these sinkholes open up under you without warning? I'd like to know if I'm gonna be swallowed up by the desert. Ma's heart would break."

"You were time compressed and you survived," Quistis said wryly. "He says it's the Egabi crater."

They ought to circle the thing first, though, Squall thought. Because Zell had a point. They were working with very little concrete information. Standard Cid, really.

"Keep your eyes peeled for anything out of place," Squall told them. "We approach from the South, then circle the crater from at least five meters out. Judging from the reports on the topography, that should give us visibility of most of the crater floor. Close in as necessary, but with extreme caution. You both head along the West. I'll take the East. We'll cover it more quickly that way and meet to discuss on the other side."

They saluted. They looked worried. Quistis looked the more worried of the two, but she was too professional to say anything. Zell said, "Squall, I don't know that we should split up. Cid's being even weirder than normal about this, and—"

In response, Squall swung a leg over one of the motorbikes they'd pulled off the transport sub, pulled on his helmet, and started the engine. He rode off.

He didn't feel like discussing his orders. There was no real divide between friend and junior ranking officer with Zell. So Squall had to introduce a divide for the sake of missions. This, he privately felt, was a favor he performed for Zell's benefit as much as his own.

He was, in his own small and quiet way, pleased to have acquired a friend. Four friends. And a girlfriend. They were high-maintenance creatures, more finicky and less docile than GFs, prone to irrationalities, and often completely unaware that in a non-working day Squall required at least three hours by himself, away from their constant havoc, or else they simply tired him out.

And in a working day, they could expect to see him not as a friend at all. Simply as Commander.

He surveyed the crater from where he'd stopped. It was wide and deep. The loose sand sloped down gently for about thirty five meters. Then it gave way to reddish rock that steeply jutted down to the floor of the thing, which continued on for some time. The opposite side wasn't visible from here. There were no sinkholes that he could detect. There were a few far-off cactuars dotting the chasm floor.

Squall nudged Shiva out of his brain and had her float to the edge to get a better look. She couldn't retain much of the information for very long, but any brief snapshot she could give him was better than nothing. It took careful prodding. He'd junctioned her for so long that she believed, by now, that she and Squall were one and the same. He liked the easy loyalty that gave him, and the connectivity with her; he didn't want to disavow her of the notion. So he'd held off on using Irvine's bargaining techniques. Those did more than let you keep what you wanted. They reminded even long-junctioned GFs that you were something different from them and that was unpleasant. Then you felt you had an intruder in your head.

Squall held onto his memories through sheer mental willpower, the same boost the rest of them had used seven months ago, in Trabia, to recover some fragments of their time at the orphanage. You just needed a few neurons to fire, a small reminder that memories had once been there. And you had to accept that this was an imperfect system. Sometimes the memories of the memories got taken as well. Sometimes, as soon as you reminded yourself that they were there, you lost anything connected to them that you had happened to retain.

But the only surefire alternative was not junctioning. And that was no alternative at all. It rendered you powerless. And it was cowardly, besides. Most people didn't lose everything. 99% survived the junctioning experience with enough memories to not even realize they'd been changed by it. Irvine was just paranoid, hyper-cautious. Squall, for his part, didn't mind a little risk.

Shiva floated back, tethered to him by her earthly Manifest, the ice fragment stud Squall usually kept in his left ear. It was like returning home for her. She was buzzing with mental images but they faded quickly. Squall caught nothing odder than what he was seeing himself at this distance. He started up the bike again. He needed a different angle of the crater floor.

They would have to tackle this themselves, whatever this was. Cid wouldn't be much help. Cid rarely was. Squall didn't disrespect him, not really. It would have been hypocritical to disrespect the only man to ever give him a home. But at Garden Cid had always been peculiarly disconnected from him, not emotionally invested, even as he remained hands-on about Squall's gunblade training, determined to teach him every angle of the assigned syllabus and more.

It had been strangely alienating.

Though at the time Squall had been so used to the treatment that he wouldn't have described it that way. And it made sense now. Cid had expected to have to send Squall off to fight Ultimecia in the future; to perhaps have Squall lost in time compression, jumping from place to place, forever. And so he'd prepared Squall as best he could, while emotionally shielding himself from any grief or remorse that might result if Garden's own sacrificial lamb didn't survive the role Cid had carved out for him.

It was how Squall himself would have approached it, really.

_That's horrible!_

Squall stopped the bike. Shiva. He was very aware just then that this came from her, and she sent him a little frisson of confusion, because as far as she was concerned, what came from her came from him. She was even more linked to him than Rinoa was. But she couldn't think the way he could. She had no memories to ground her thoughts in. Right? So maybe, maybe…the thought had come from him. From somewhere deep inside him. She'd just fixated on it.

Because that was what he did think, deep down. He did think it was horrible, the way Cid had used him and the others. Horrible but necessary.

But pushing Squall away, keeping him at a distance…? That hadn't been necessary. Squall had faced up to this in his own life, after all. How holding others at arm's length could be nothing more than cowardice, nothing more than the fear that they might leave. Instead of taking a chance on them, instead of holding out to show them that he was a person, that he shouldn't be left behind – he simply told himself it didn't hurt. He wasn't connected to them in any way, so who cared if they left? It didn't matter.

But to discover that Cid might have been thought of _him_ the same way?

That hurt.

Because he'd always trusted Cid. Always. Cid featured in the memories that he fought hardest to keep. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages thirty-something and five and six. Training. Cid and himself and Seifer; ages nearly-forty and eleven and twelve. Training some more. Cid handing him the standard psychological evaluation for junior cadets, saying, "Now, Squall, I suspect you won't pass, but we'll work it out between us, you and I." And then small, inexplicable burst of hope that even Squall hadn't understood. Like maybe Cid meant he'd help, really help. He'd stand by Squall. He'd be… something like a father.

Then a note in Cid's hand a week later, when Squall had stopped into the infirmary for some minor scrape. Taped to the first paper on the stack of evaluations:_ Disregard the notes. Clear this student for training._ It had been Squall's paper. That was how Cid worked things out.

A few months ago, after the news about Squall's biological father had surfaced, Cid had called in to Xu via vidscreen and caught sight of the boy he'd appointed Commander.

"Squall! You cut your hair! You look nothing like your picture in all the papers now," he'd said. Then dismissively turned away.

That was it. That was all Squall had heard of him in the past seven months.

Cid had never let himself really like Squall once he'd learned what Squall's role was to be, never really offered Squall any kind of human connection. And, somewhere deep inside, it made Squall furious. When Cid made stupid observations, Squall saluted perfectly and kept his mouth shut, because that was what Squall did, ninety-five percent of the time. But Squall should have put down him cruelly: for shutting off any feeling he'd ever had for Squall and the rest of the orphanage gang, for keeping secrets from the children in his care, for shoving these missions and this life on them. The papers said it was Fate that had brought Squall to this point in his life, and maybe it was. But sometimes Squall wondered if 'Fate' came with the last name 'Kramer.'

But Squall never did talk back to Cid, or even tolerate much rebellious talk about the man. It would have stirred up exactly all these thoughts: painful thoughts. And it was second nature to him at this point to hold his cruel conclusions and painful thoughts in. To hold every thought in. The problem was, more and more he'd begun to feel a strange new sense of discomfort in doing this. Because he wanted to say what he felt. He did.

Before making friends with Rinoa and the rest of them, it hadn't mattered. He'd been the only possible judge of his words and thoughts and actions – the only being in the universe that counted. Maybe Seifer had come close. But not as an independent person, not really. More as a reflection of himself, the boy who verbalized everything Squall wanted to say and then some, a strange extension of Squall; nothing more. And then Seifer had died and come back to life, and everything had changed. Squall had met new people – Rinoa, who plunged right into desert prisons to rescue people she hardly knew; and Irvine, who seemed like a cowardly creep until you got to know him; and even Laguna, who Squall couldn't escape from, not really, not any more than he could escape from any of the difficult realities in his life.

Also, he'd seen his whole home smashed apart. It gave him some perspective.

Suddenly, he'd realized that there were a lot more people out there, living independent and whole and separate from him, and that letting them see all of him wasn't a bad thing. Even them judging him wasn't a bad thing, because they were in the same boat. They were alone, and abandoned inside, probably even Cid was. And all most of them were doing was reaching out to get their point across, reaching out for some connection. Unafraid of the consequences.

That took guts. Guts that Squall, until recently, had not possessed. Guts that Cid probably didn't possess even now. Men like Squall and Cid thought reaching out to others was a stupid endeavor. Worthless, futile, people were going to vanish, and they would end up alone anyway, so what was the point? But that was just it. The reaching out was the point.

Squall was not a romantic. He didn't wax rhapsodic about Rinoa's mouth. He didn't much care about her lovely eyes (in fact, some creep at the Deling City meeting had told her her eyes were like the moon reflected on the ocean, and he'd privately found amusement in her response: "An ocean of what? Wrongfully-exported timber? My eyes are brown.") He'd only liked finding, quite unexpectedly, that Rinoa was a complete person too.

She didn't let him forget it. She was all stubbornness and strength – really, she was. People assumed otherwise, because she wasn't SeeD, and because she couldn't fight as well as they could. Because she babied her dog. Because she owned an alarming number of pink things. But Rinoa was someone who, in her heart of hearts, was always raising a complaint. Always determined to poke and nudge. Always had a cause – couldn't function without one, which was probably some kind of disorder, but there you had it – and who was always looking to find other people to link with, to help, to harangue, to fight for. She was always trying to connect. Invariably, at some point she'd gotten through to Squall. And that was when he'd learned that other human beings were fantastic universes, centers of judgment in their own right. And he could go through life ignoring that. Or he could come clean about what he was thinking, open up, express himself, and let them that see that he was a universe, too. He liked that latter option better. It was more courageous. And it meant he felt less alone alone. He wasn't going through life so hurt from when people had left him or dismissed him that he'd deluded himself into thinking he as the only creature in existence.

Only. Just as he'd discovered this new form of courage—

Fate had plopped him into a job where courageously expressing himself didn't matter. And in fact he was better off not doing it. He was a surprisingly sarcastic and wry person. He might now be open to making and maintaining one or two or four (no more; baby steps) friendships. But he wasn't friendly by nature; he was kind of an asshole. He had a lot of loss and anger he'd never dealt with. Not hate, not really. He didn't think he had it in him to hate people. He wasn't so troubled as all that. But frustration. Pain. Abandonment.

Only professional duty demanded that he keep all that under wraps. Never express it. Play the game like Cid had, never really showing his true colors.

Now, Squall loved Garden, inasmuch as love meant 'never had any other home and therefore would probably die for this one.' But the fact was – the place was interfering with what he really wanted to do. Let his feelings out. Let out his inner jerk. Not a lot. Not for everybody, or even for most people, because most people were still a headache. But just a little. Just to connect with the other jerks, his jerks. The ones who – like Cid – had come to mean something to him in spite of himself. Just to remind them he existed; he wasn't some walking ghost they could shove away on a whim.

Possibly he'd saved the world and come out with the wrong lesson after it. Maybe the point had been that he'd been perfect as he was, and as long as he kept on ignoring everybody he could keep his mouth shut, never bother with anyone, and that was alright. Everything would still be puppies and rainbows. Here, Squall, see? You were a real sack of shit, an abandoned orphan with a chip on your shoulder, for upwards of ten years. But you pulled through (somehow; he still didn't know how he'd done it), and now you've been rewarded. Garden Command. Now put your game face on, and shut up. We've got Commanding to do. Not connection.

But if he chose that, then he would lose out on all these universes: his own, and other people's too. He would become, for lack of a better word, time compressed. Stuck in this weird state where he was the only living creature worth a damn, the center of everything, and perfectly happy to be achingly lonely.

Fuck that.

Only not, because actually that was the perfect attitude to have – oh, not for Squall the human being, trying and failing and driving Deling politicians to drink with his sarcastic retorts. But for Squall the Commander, Cid's successor, stone-faced and alone.

He'd covered roughly a quarter of the crater's rim by now. The Commander in him had been taking mental notes the whole time. The human being? Just sort of quietly fuming. This was permissible because the Commander hadn't noticed anything the slightest bit odd. He'd sent Shiva to the edge a few more times. She always came back with the same mental images: chasm floors full of fat and happy cactuars.

But now he caught something in the far background of one of her visions.

Dust clouds. Not uncommon in the Kashkabald, except that these seemed more like frenzied dust tornadoes. Of thick black dust.

Squall sent Shiva back out to the edge for a second look. She went and returned. It wasn't a fluke. Black dust and smoke in the center of the crater. He revved up the engine and rode a little ways further along the eastern side, then sent her out again, just to be sure. And found that they could be sure. The dust clouds were getting bigger. Something incredibly chaotic was happening out in the middle of the Egabi.

The Egabi was an odd formation. A giant crater in the middle of the desert, it made an almost perfect circle – no one had ever checked to be sure it wasn't, as far as Squall knew – and it had a strange, unnatural quiet about it. It was a trick of the area. To the West, the Almaj mountains loomed imposingly, and to the South, a brush shoreline gave way to the most chaotic stretch of sea on the planet. People didn't thrive in the Egabi. Hadn't since the days of the Ancient Centrans. The place was cactuar territory, home to roving creatures that escaped cactuar island and migrated to the crater for unknown biological reasons.

The crater, and all the Eastern reaches of Centra, essentially belonged to Esthar. In the bad old days of the Estharian-Galbadian War, the territory had been disputed. But Esthar had won it for the most part; the Sorceress Adel had been startlingly good at getting whatever she wanted through sheer militaristic aggression. And she'd wanted all of Centra, reputedly the ancestral home of Hyne and the sorceresses. When Esthar had closed its borders, though, all expansionist aims had been dropped. Official control of the territory was once again up in the air. Cautious settlers like the Kramers had ventured into the Western reaches of the islands, and Esthar had let it be. Nowadays all the city cared about were the oilfields in the Northeast desert.

Still. Anything they found out here, they had to at least consider reporting to Laguna.

That thought put Squall in an even worse mood than before. He knew Laguna had just not known about him. A man like Laguna could never have intended to abandon him. And nothing about the way Squall's life had turned out was really Laguna's fault, unless you went back to his very conception, because, yes, that had been Laguna all the way. That was what fatherhood meant.

The problem was that Squall had been inside the man's head, stuck in there like a GF, as connected as to another person as he could get.

And they had nothing in common.

Laguna had never felt alone, not a day in his life. He'd been raised in a world that hadn't even contemplated the extent of the war to come, born the cherished son of a cheerful Deling City stenographer and a Deling palace guard. He'd made fast friends with Ward and Kiros during military training (a process he'd half-assed as much as possible) and stumbled into a career buying and selling stories out of Timber, peddling his words. Laguna was fairly free with words.

The only thing he had in common with Squall was that eventually the world had decided he was born for heroism, and rewarded him accordingly with a job he didn't like very much. But that was the thing Squall liked least about himself. He didn't particularly want to engage in father-son bonding over the fact that he and Laguna were both ill-suited to the fates thrown on them. Fate was an asshole. It had given Squall a father who could never possibly understand Squall, a mismatch, a connection error.

So Squall would have Xu alert him if they found anything out here. He would keep it professional. Distant. In fact, maybe he'd have Xu alert Laguna to the existence of the crater, period. Laguna was bound to have no idea what was going on in the furthest reaches of his domain. But if someone told him, then possibly Esthar could take the whole thing off their hands.

As he rounded the edge of the crater, he considered going down there himself anyway, just to check it out. Squall was no coward. Black dust didn't scare him. Neither did sinkholes. But a moment's reflection quelled the impulse. That was pointless showing off: a silly, grandiose adventurer's gesture. They had no idea what sinkholes in the Egabi pointed to; it could be nothing, though to go by Cid's attitude something was up. But either way. Nothing said Garden had to deal with it. And if Cid thought they should, then maybe he should start pleading his case to the appropriate authorities (Squall and Xu) like every other run-of-the-mill client had to.

Squall cleared his half of the crater in an hour, then stood surveying the still-growing dust cloud as he waited for Quistis and Zell. They appeared on the horizon in a whirl of dirt and sand, and as soon as they'd parked their bikes and removed their helmets, Zell said, "Did you see? We should head down there."

"No," Quistis said. "No, we shouldn't. It's stupid. We don't know that there's anything to gain. It would be pointless grandstanding—"

Her vidphone went off. She held it up so they could see who was trying to reach her. Cid.

"Well, never mind. He wants us to meet him," she said, "Down on the crater floor."

It was still pointless grandstanding. But now it was on a client's orders. Cid's orders.

Squall almost wished he could say no.

* * *

Cid packed his patient off on a class-C Garden transport. Fast. Sleek. Painted a cheerful blue, like a fishing vessel out of FH, to disguise the fact that it had once belonged to bunch of mercenaries and had fallen into Cid's hands only because he'd claimed it as part of his retirement package.

His patient scowled at the color. Cid blinked. He'd never understood this particular student.

"The sorceress knows all about it," Cid said. "She can tell you more. But it's on the peninsula. The black grounds, they call it these days. Whatever you do, don't go for Deling City's. You might be recognized in Deling."

His patient's scowl deepened. Cid fussed over the blanket, the battered grey coat underneath, the bandages. His patient waved him away. Cid programmed the transport for Dollet, then hopped off just as it pushed off from the shore.

With this done, he sent a message to Quistis.

He didn't tell the kids everything he knew about the Egabi straight off. It was nothing personal. He just worried about them getting down too quickly, figuring it out, coming back in time to stumble into the house, to see the mess and grime and blood, and all the old books Cid had dug up. Research.

This way, they'd get down into the crater slowly. They'd piece it together little by little. Squall, Quistis, and Zell were smart, so he had no doubt they'd figure it out eventually. Just not right away. And this would buy Cid and his guest some more time.

Although, come to think of it, Cid wondered if he could get them to understand, to help. There had to be a way. They were all connected. All of them. Every single one of them had a role to play. Sometimes an awful one. But still a role. And maybe they just needed to step into each other's shoes sometimes.

He pondered this while he filled canteens. He had resolved to pack everyone a canteen. Of course, he was sure they'd all have one on them. They were SeeDs, and they were prepared for any climate, even for the Egabi, which was a hot, dry, awful place. Cid himself had written the manual on how to survive it, as he'd made the crossing from Esthar to the Orphanage a fair few times in his life, and understood exactly what one needed to survive there. So he knew exactly what they'd be packing with them.

But still. It was the thought that counted. His kids would need something to drink.


	6. Chapter 6

The library was closed when Selphie, Irvine, and Rinoa reached Deling City. It was the early morning of the 18th, and the place didn't open for alumni until the evenings. Besides this, Rinoa needed her access pass. Only she'd left it at her father's house and she didn't want to go there to stay, not if she could help it. She'd already spent a fairly stressful weekend there with Squall. And she didn't want to make a thing out of just dropping by for overnight visits, like she and Caraway were on good terms.

They weren't. She went home only because every time she visited Deling City she was refused access to the better class of hotel. After Edea's well-broadcast (and, in hindsight to the public, horrifying) assassination of President Vinzer Deling, Deling City hoteliers tended to announce themselves fully booked when a sorceress dropped by. And the seedy places would take her, but not without leaking it to all the papers. She could sign under a false name in any other city, but in Deling they triple-checked your identity. Paranoia ran high. It always had; paranoia was a part of the Galbadian national character, embedded deep in the citizens' collective mind after the war with Adel. Embedded, and growing deeper roots every day.

"How about we swing by my house, but we stay at your place?" she asked Irvine. He'd let it slip once that his dad lived on the outskirts. Or. Well. More specifically, he'd let slip that his dad lived on the outskirts so that he could commute more effectively to his job in the D-District. Irvine's dad might have been present at the time they'd staged a prison break, but no big deal. Honestly. No big deal, Rinoa. He wasn't attached to the D-District or to his dad; neither the place nor the personality of the man had been conducive to those little familial rituals like Take Your Son To Work Day. He hadn't talked to his dad in nearly a year; hadn't seen him in more than that; didn't even know anything about what the man was up to, if he lived or died, what he liked to do, or even what he did do on a day-to-day basis.

Rinoa could relate. But, come to think of it, if Irvine had known the latter, it might have come in useful during their rather haphazard prison break.

"You're suggesting we stay at my dad's place," Irvine said. Something about him seemed tired now that he'd discovered the depths of this week's smear campaign. Rinoa couldn't blame him. But she wasn't asking just to avoid Caraway. The outskirts made a certain amount of strategic sense. That was where Squall would have decided to stay: out of sight, where they wouldn't alert anyone who happened to be illegally using GF magic in the middle of the city.

"I don't think that's a good idea," Selphie said, putting a hand lightly on Irvine's arm. He seemed surprised at the action, but he smoothed it over quickly, and went back to looking light, easygoing, and unaffected by everything – that unique Kinneas slacker cocktail of emotions.

"Well," Rinoa said, "It's inconspicuous. Out of the way. Right? So what would be your preferred alternative?"

"Rot," said Selphie.

"It's not rot!" Rinoa said.

"No," Irvine said casually. "She's right. That would be my preferred alternative. To rot. To just rot."

Rinoa blinked at them.

"I miss when Garden could just book a hotel for you in advance," Selphie said.

"You got that kind of treatment?" said Irvine. He whistled between his teeth. "Nice for you."

"Only once," said Selphie. "It was in the good days. The glory days. We had this silly client out in Timber, some rebel princess who couldn't strategize for beans and avoided her father at all costs—"

"Hey!" Rinoa said.

Okay, maybe she deserved that a little. Her idea had still been a perfectly strategically sound one.

But she was outvoted. Caraway's mansion it was.

The maid let them in as soon as she saw Rinoa. Or rather, she let them in as far as the atrium off of the main staircase, then muttered something under her breath, then retreated into the kitchen downstairs, performing the bisecting cross of Hyne all the way. Rinoa recited the stupid old rite to ward off sorceresses in her head, almost on reflex, as she saw the woman do this. Magic half to magic half. Human to stay human.

Rinoa missed the old staff, the ones her mom had hired years ago, who'd been here all through her childhood. Most of them had been Timberi, and they'd disappeared from the household soon after Rinoa had run off the join the Forest Owls. Nothing personal, Caraway had explained to her. He'd just never before considered what kinds of propaganda they might have been feeding his daughter.

Rinoa had wanted to track them down, offer money, get them jobs as Garden staff – do_something_. But most people from her old life saw her as changed. Her old friends. Many of her associates in Timber. Her few sympathetic contacts in the Deling Foreign Office, who'd known her dad for years and felt fairly bad for her. They said no, no; we couldn't possibly accept your help. You've helped us so much, after all. You're such a helpful girl.

And what they meant was: we don't want it. Go away. Your help could be dangerous now. You're a _witch_.

Rinoa wouldn't have been able to bear it if Undine, her old nanny, treated her like that. Carefully. Half fearfully. Always looking like she were thinking of the ruin of Trabia Garden, or the Lunar Cry attack on Esthar. As though Rinoa were inexorably linked to all that, which unfortunately Rinoa kind of was, if only by accident. She could have borne it even less from Tiria the undermaid. Or Frantz, the butler. They'd been like family growing up. These new people weren't family; it didn't matter so much if they were scared of her.

"Not friendly with the staff?" Selphie said lightly. "We had this Shumi Guardian up at T-Garden who hated us, I swear. He was some kind of NorG spy, I think. Sent up from Balamb. Hated students on principle."

"Small-minded," Irvine said, wiping his boots thoughtfully on Caraway's entry mat.

"That's what I think!" said Selphie. She was looking down at the entry mat herself, so she clearly noticed that it was there. But she didn't bother to wipe her boots. Selphie was Rinoa's primary girl talk confidant; she simply had an aura about her that prompted you to tell her things. So she knew all about the mass dismissal of the old housemaids, Caraway's role in quashing sixteen Timber rebellions to date, the various deaths he signed off on with nary a care; and how he prized his job above human decency, and order above all, and Rinoa somewhere in the middle, above the rest of humanity, but below intangible things like his good name and his military record.

Selphie was making it known that she would stomp through this guy's house with muddy boots if she damn well felt like it. Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for Selphie.

"I wouldn't've let it bother me, Selphie," Irvine said. "That Shumi Guardian, I mean." He waved one hand as though dismissing this unknown person, and with the other thoughtfully hung up his cap. But his voice was loud enough to be heard down in the kitchen and probably on the upper landing, too. "People like to scapegoat where they can, right?"

He was obviously not just talking about the Shumi Guardian. Rinoa felt a sudden rush of love for the both of them.

"Shhh," she said. "Lay off the heavy-handed analogies or whatever. She's just a maid. She probably doesn't mean to be—"

"Nobody means to mistrust and mistreat you," Selphie said, rolling her eyes.

"I feel bad for them, honestly," Irvine said, still too loudly. "Ruled by their fear."

"Right?" said Selphie. "Pathetic."

"Especially since they're afraid of you," said Irvine. He spread his arms out in a silent supplicant gesture to Hyne, indicating that he, privately, felt that fearing Rinoa was a ridiculous notion. That was comforting of him. Rinoa wished he could be right.

Selphie said, "Yeah. Afraid of you and not your friends. We're scarier. I mean, Squall? Imagine what he'd do if he found you being treated like this."

"I'd rather not," Rinoa said, smiling a little. "I kept it from him last week, and he was bad enough then."

"You shouldn't've bothered. They shouldn't be scared of your magic," Irvine said. "They should be scared that you've been adopted into the Orphanage Gang."

"Very bad company," Selphie put in.

"Desperadoes and ruffians," said Irvine.

"Lost kids. Lost souls. No homes," Selphie said. "No cares, no rules."

"I hear one of them's the Terror of Timber," Rinoa said.

"That's nothing," said Selphie, holding her hands up like she was about to launch into a particularly horrifying campfire ghost story. "They're the Terror of Timber, Trabia, and Esthar. The Scourge of Dollet. The unlikely rescuers of Deling City from the clutches of that one sorceress that one time. But this doesn't recommend them, since this city? Kinda sucks."

"They'll save your world and they don't even care, the jerks," Rinoa said, laughing despite herself.

"So big-headed," said Selphie.

"Ready to seduce away your sons and daughters," put in Irvine with a wink.

"Yes," came Caraway's voice from the upper landing. "I can see that."

Ugh.

All merriment died down. This was Caraway's talent. He sucked the joy out of every room he entered. Rinoa supposed this came in useful for him in his daily routine, as a big-name bully and all.

Oddly, he and Squall had hit it off last weekend. They'd reached a grim and silent accord. Caraway had made it clear that he didn't hold Rinoa becoming a sorceress against Squall; that was all the inevitable consequence of his daughter's own poor life choices. Now she'd irreparably ruined her future. And Squall had made it clear that he didn't agree on that count, and that furthermore he would be taking charge of any threats against Rinoa's safety for the next foreseeable eternity, so he thought her chances in life were fairly good, actually.

Caraway had liked that. He respected a little bit of overbearing arrogance in a man.

Squall was – had proven himself to be – the single most heroic, self-sacrificing, romantic person on the planet. Rinoa was lucky to have him.

She also sometimes found him a little obnoxious. Rinoa had an unfortunate history of falling for men who were good at making bold proclamations and grand gestures, larger than life men, men on General Caraway's level. Squall was not the worst of the ones she'd picked in this respect; he had a streak of normal teenage surliness that undercut his heroic image, and he was frequently very down to earth, only too happy to bring you down from your grand pedestal. The secret champion of the sarcastic underdog. That said, he was still her Knight. Tied to her for all infinity. Would die for her. Completely responsible for her wellbeing.

It was a little like being someone's child. Rinoa had had a few months to get used to the whole sorceress and knight thing. And she hadn't. Gotten used to it, that is. She didn't like the feeling of it. She wanted to be safe – of course she did. But more than that, she wanted to be safe on her own terms. She didn't want a bodyguard-slash-babysitter looking over her shoulder her whole life. She didn't particularly want to be a sorceress, when it came to that.

There she and Caraway were in agreement, she supposed.

"Friends?" Caraway said. He didn't sound pleased. He did not, as a rule, approve of SeeDs as friends, nor did he approve of B-Garden. B-Garden was the home of the gutless nouveau riche, a way for poor, unimportant, otherwise worthless kids to get money quickly, provided they had little to no ties to any particular region, no real loyalty or honor (in Caraway's estimation), and didn't die taking the SeeD test. He'd never liked Timber rebels, Dolletian activists, the countrified bumpkins of Winhill, or the strange cheerful wintry folk of Trabia. But in his mind they were all better than most SeeDs. They at least had roots somewhere, strong sympathies with their local governments, patriotism, honest desire to die for Hyne and country. Whereas kids who flocked to Balamb inevitably sold their honor to the highest bidder. Cid Kramer had long demonstrated a blatant disregard for any kind of moral code, and his lot had been known to fight on both sides of a conflict, as long as they were paid to do it and got to skulk back in the end to their little island, which stank of fish and the working class, to hole up far from where Deling City could reach them. SeeDs were almost worse than Estharians, almost worse than pacifists. Of all the peoples of the earth, in Caraway's ideal universe, the SeeDs would be first against the wall. Even before the FH crowd. SeeDs weren't gutless pacifists, but they were problems. Caraway could make peace with one or two, particularly if that one or two happened to be tethered to his daughter by honor and magic, duty-bound to protect her. But in general to mention the name SeeD in his house was to point out a bite bug or geezard, a creature of degraded status and ill repute.

This was the image of SeeD that Rinoa had grown up with.

"You know Selphie and Irvine, right?" said Rinoa. "They left their respective gardens for Balamb, remember? They chose the SeeD life. Isn't that nice?"

Selphie and Irvine seemed confused at this rejoinder, because they didn't know Caraway like she knew him. But they could probably piece together that this was a dig. She couldn't resist needling him. Just a little.

"Grand," Caraway said, the way people pronounced a sentence of execution. "You're more social than normal lately."

"Not really," Rinoa said. "I've always had friends."

Had. Her reception with class A last week had been chilly, at best. Oh, Rinoa, you're _alive_. What a relief. When we heard you'd dropped out and run off to Timber of all places; we were all sure you'd died. You're so _dramatic_, Rinoa. You must _love_ being all over the papers. What's being a sorceress like? Leave it to you to soak up a piece of Hyne; you always did like a little attention. Like that time your chocobo won the gold at the track, yeah?

They, a cabal of nine elite Galbadian heirs and heiresses, the only kids Rinoa had ever been allowed to talk to growing up, hid a barb in every statement. Rinoa had come to see this as typical of Deling City, but it wasn't, not really. Irvine was from Deling City, but a different kind of Deling entirely; where fathers worked tirelessly from dawn to dusk in service of the regime with no mansions or grand parties as a reward, where no one got to go to prep school, and where the army was one's certain future. Caraway had always intimated that people like Irvine could be classed somewhere between cannon fodder and babbling infants one had to look after for their own good. But Rinoa was coming to prefer them to her old schoolmates.

Which didn't mean she'd been unhappy to see her mates. It had been almost a relief, actually. She expected them to look down on her. The SeeDs saw her as a pretty rich girl and not much more, lucky in every way. But to her fellow Galbadians Rinoa had always been weird. It almost didn't matter that she was a sorceress now. They would have been poking fun at her anyway for something else if she hadn't been. For always being the one to raise her hand and argue facts that everyone in Vinzer Deling's realm knew with certainty were Wrong, and besides this Traitorous. For causing her father so much trouble. For using Caraway's good name to get away with things a lesser girl would have been shot for or imprisoned over. For having a cabaret singer mother. For looking a tiny, tiny bit Timberi.

Yes, everyone on the Galbadian continent was related, but Timber had once been the access point for Esthar, and everyone knew the Timberi had intermarried with the ancestral Enemy. They had the general coloring of the Southern Galbadian continent, to be sure. But there was something about the eyes: dark, dark eyes. And so short. Rinoa was so lucky she was pretty. It would have been awful to be partially Estharian and ugly to boot, but then Timberi were generally attractive in a rough sort of way. No wonder Rinoa was so vain.

Horrible as it was to admit, after months and months of hearing that she was secretly Ultimecia herself, that sort of criticism was almost comforting to Rinoa. It was banal. Normal. It almost took for granted the idea that Rinoa was small and not special and definitely not likely to snap and attempt world takeover, like 95% of all sorceresses did in the end. And, when you got down to it, she'd grown up with these people. She'd been to all the birthday parties (invited only to cater to her father, but still invited), she'd played on the same teams (rarely picked first or second or even eighth, but that was the old gang for you), and learned a fair number of their secrets. She didn't hate them, not really, not even if she resented some of them and found them all to be stupid, utterly stupid. She just didn't really like them either. They existed in the same grey area as Caraway, as Seifer Almasy.

They were people she had to harden her heart against, because the truth was: they were very, very hurtful.

"Well, we'll head to my room now, if you don't mind," Rinoa said, brushing all that out of her mind for the time being.

"We have guest rooms," Caraway said, eyeing Irvine with distaste.

Irvine reached up to tip his hat in agreement, but he wasn't wearing it because he'd hung it up, so he settled for nodding, and looking tired again. Selphie snorted in disgust.

"Why don't you just tell your father the truth, Rinoa?" she asked, very suddenly.

Rinoa and Irvine stared at her. The truth? Was she crazy? For all they knew, Caraway could be in on the whole hidden GF thing. He had no love for Xu and SeeD, and almost certainly would have looked the other way if he discovered someone defying Balamb Garden.

But Irvine seemed to instinctively trust Selphie. He always had a way of deferring to her, going along cautiously but still laying his neck out, riskier than he normally was, just because Selphie happened to be involved. He said, "C'mon now, Sef—" in what Rinoa had realized, four months into knowing him, was one of his fake tones, his dissembling tones, just a front. "C'mon now. We—we're just here for…Um."

He trailed off. Rinoa would have been hard pressed to believe he wasn't someone attempting to come up with a false story. He just managed to look so shifty as he spoke.

"A GF thing?" he offered. The actual truth. But somehow in the mouth of an overly-casual, slouching, suspicious, working-class Deling boy, it looked like a lie.

"Do you think I'm a fool, boy?" snapped Caraway.

"Honestly, Kinneas," Selphie said. She was less convincing than he was, playing her role of aggrieved superior just a little too perfectly, like her training in deceit stemmed mostly from rehearsals for the Trabia Garden Festival Committee's next theatrical revue. Which it doubtlessly did. But Rinoa thought Caraway was buying it, and that was the important thing. And then Selphie saluted him, which was good form. Caraway loved a good grovel.

"It's nothing to do with you, sir," Selphie said. "In fact, I think our aims align."

"Is that so?" Caraway said. _That_ was maybe pushing it too far. Caraway's alliances with the SeeDs extended as far as agreeing to let them take the fall for murdering a sorceress, which at that time had been to him like setting cockroaches on a rabid sewer rat growing too big to be contained. If they died, so what? They were roaches. And maybe they could get rid of the other, more dangerous pest problem before the life was stamped out of them.

Selphie pressed on. "I've clearance to reveal three facts. One, the rampant dissatisfaction at G-Garden, SeeD Kinneas's old stomping ground, is a cause for concern—" she managed to make it sound like herein lay the whole reason for bringing SeeD Kinneas, clearly a sorry excuse for a SeeD, along in the first place – "Two, certain allegations made by Martine at an internal Garden investigation. Martine revealed that he and certain G-Garden cadets sought to use the assassination of the sorceress seven months ago as a chance to stage their own coup—" Oh. Good one. The idea that one of Caraway's pawns might have schemed against him was something Caraway was open to. He was paranoid, and instinctively mistrusted anyone below him, which was nearly everyone. "And three. The possible existence of a similar plot in the works at this moment, aiming to lure the Sorceress Rinoa to Galbadia in order to accomplish the same aims. Kill her, and take over Deling City as its saviors."

This was believable. Half of the world wanted the sorceress dead, and was sure accomplishing it could tilt the balance of power in their favor, because people were supposed to hail you and adore you when you took out a sorceress, right? At least that was the theory.

"Rinoa is safe," Caraway said, appalled. "Particularly as long as she is under my roof!" The last point really got to him. He'd always viewed people tangling with Rinoa as people tangling with him. He loved her in his own way; Rinoa knew this. It was just that his form of love involved assuming that Rinoa was simply an extension of his own personal sovereignty, a possession you didn't mess with unless you wanted to suffer.

"Sir," Irvine said, looking pitiful and apologetic, and pulling the look off pretty well. "We want that to be the case as much as you do."

"We aim to prevent any internal Garden strife from spilling over into your home and your daughter's life," Selphie said. She'd been sneaking glances at Rinoa the whole time, as if determined to telepathically force her to say the right thing.

Rinoa wasn't sure what the right thing was. Not right away. But then she thought like a SeeD.

"That's why I hired them as soon as Squall told me all about it," she said to Caraway. "To deal with this whole mess before it becomes a real problem."

"You hired them to bring you back to a city where you know you're in danger?" said Caraway, openly furious by now. "You're even sillier than I gave you credit for, Rinoa!"

Oh, for. That was just stupid. Every city was a city where she was in danger at this point. She hadn't been out of danger since her father decided to meddle with assassinating the sorceress Edea and had inadvertently set up a colossal skirmish between the gardens, leading to the battle where Rinoa soaked up her first set of sorceress powers.

Or earlier. Since he gave the order to murder six Timberi rebels and their families and left a copy sitting carelessly on his desk, where his daughter could see it and subsequently decide that maybe it was time to do something about all his shady dealings. If he was going to complain about putting her in danger, he needed to think about maybe not setting up these vast militaristic chess games where he just assumed everyone else's life was up for grabs. It was tacky. And stupid. And highly hazardous to her health, and for that matter to the health of entirely unrelated innocents who'd never done anything to Fury Caraway except not bend at the knee to his stupid country.

"You know I can't sit around if someone is trying to kill me," Rinoa told him. "I don't just ignore a threat."

"Well, you must have received something from me," Caraway snapped. "Dismissed, the three of you. To your room and the West Wing guest rooms while you're in the house." Typical. Her room was in the East Wing. He wanted to separate them as much as possible. "If you're still here tonight then I expect to see you at dinner, Rinoa. You other two can eat in your rooms if you're here. Accomplish your objectives and then get out."

Of his house, or of his country? The subtext was unclear. He turned on his heel and left.

Selphie waited until he was out of earshot. Then she said, in a low voice, "You know how some people say Hyne was just sliced in half? Not, like, that his skin came off, but that humans just cut him down the middle? I think your father is the half of Hyne's pecker that got cut off and thrust at the world. The part with no magic and even less sense of humor! Just a walking, humorless penis."

She sounded so deadly serious, so unlike her normal bubbly self, that Irvine's eyebrows shot up, and he bit his lip to keep from laughing. Rinoa herself had to fight down a grin.

"He's going to be sending someone along to listen in on us," she warned them. "And to make sure we go where he says. So let me just go collect my pass, and we can get out of here and talk elsewhere."

She headed upstairs.

"Works for me," she heard Irvine say. "There was no point in wiping off my boots, was there? Never been in a more unwelcoming place."

"Yep," Selphie told him cheerfully, delighting in leaving dirty trails on Caraway's expensive rugs as she hopped from the first step of the stair to the second. "You're too soft, Irvine. Too pure. You hide it, but I'm onto you."

"Yeah?" Irvine said. He sounded pleased.

"Yeah. I'm onto you, dweeb," Selphie repeated.

* * *

They scaled the rim of the Egabi, which wasn't easy by any means. They had equipment for rock climbing loaded onto their bikes, since all missions in the Kashkabald left one contemplating the possibility of having to climb the Almaj in order to make a tight escape. But the crater rim was smoother than the nearby mountains. There was less to grab onto. It was slow going all the way down. Their clothes suffered as a result. Quistis kept cursing because hers were new, purple, professional, and neat. Until she had to scale the Egabi, and they became stained, sort of a dusty blue, ripped, and grimy.

Squall took off his tailored military jacket and just tossed it down halfway. He was sweating so much that it was becoming a hindrance. He seemed unconcerned if it turned out some cactuar made off with it before he could retrieve it; he just needed to have it off, period.

Zell, for his part, could feel his hair deflate. He was grateful that he was just wearing his old clothes. No new jackets or sleek outfits for him; he was as unrecognizable now, just as he was, just as normal old Zell, as he'd been seven months ago. That had kind of galled at first. It was because he was from Balamb, and Balamb town was considered dinky and backwards and full of sad little fishermen. Forever a country mouse, that kind of thing. But then he didn't get picked on by most of the papers, and his clothing was just as reliable and old and unassuming now as it had always been, so he'd learned to see the bright side.

Also, it meant he moved faster than the other two. He didn't have anything to prove if they were caught out by some roving reporter, so he'd opted for comfort over professionalism. And besides this he wasn't learning the limits of his own clothing choices; he already knew them. If you could T-board in it, you could probably fight a war in it. The likelihood of injury was much the same.

As if to spite them, Cid was waiting at the bottom. Looking very neat and not at all out of breath, just as un-athletically middle-aged as he'd always been, but completely unruffled, like he hadn't had to scale the side of the Egabi at all.

"How'd you get down here?" Zell said.

"I took the stairs," Cid said placidly.

There were stairs? Cid pointed to his left. Zell picked up Squall's jacket, shooed away some baby cactuars, and headed off in that direction. He soon found some elaborately carved niches, each set deeper than the last, and all replete with strange images of ancient vegetation and Ancient Centran script and blocky Ancient Centran figures. They led all the way up to the top of the crater. Well, Hyne be damned. There were stairs.

"You couldn't have told us this?" Zell said, coming back to Cid. He was furious for Squall and Quistis's sakes. This was, again, Cid all over. Working for Cid was like living inside one of those complicated but incredibly stupid Estharian holographic games. You had someone outlining some quest, with an object to retrieve or a princess to rescue or something. But they never told you how to do it, so you had to play all these dumb mini games and engage in all these roundabout, unnecessary battles. Until you found whatever you were looking for, and then you gained some advantage, like an airship or a shortcut back to start. Or the knowledge that there were _stairs_. Only by that point you no longer needed that knowledge because you'd done the task already. You should have been given that crucial information before attempting the dumb quest in the first place.

"Didn't I tell you?" Cid said. "I thought I did." He reached for his old-fashioned comm. phone. "Hmmm," he said. "Looks like I forgot to hit 'send.'"

Zell leaned against the crater wall and smacked one hand against his forehead. Cid. Hyne. Something was up here. But Zell didn't know just what.

"Water?" Cid offered. Zell had some on him, but he took some of Cid's anyway, just to conserve his in case Quistis or Squall needed it later. They had less endurance for these things than he did. Also, he privately considered it a small screw you to Cid to take his help without really needing it.

He surveyed the black dust cloud in the distant center of the crater as he drank. He would have expected it to be bigger from down here. But it seemed to be getting smaller? Somehow?

"It's winding down," Zell realized. "Whatever's going on. The sinkhole forming?"

"What?" Cid said. "Oh, yes. Let's save explanations until Squall and Quistis get here, though. I don't want to have to say it twice."

"You could have just put it in the mission report," Zell pointed out.

"Well, let's just say I might not have wanted anything crucial to fall into Estharian hands," Cid said evasively. "I'll explain when they're down here. It's taking them some time. I shouldn't mention the stairs, should I?"

Zell stared at him.

"Didn't think so," Cid said. He leaned against the wall as well, where there was maximum shade. Not that he looked particularly overheated or rumpled or uncomfortable or anything. They waited together.

"The Ancient Centrans," Cid told him, for no particular reason that Zell could discern, as they watched the black dust die down, "Were a stocky, powerful people."

"What?" Zell said.

"They weren't very tall," Cid clarified. "They were compact. Powerful chests and large rib cages. Their greatest cities were on the peaks of mountains, and they carved out strange structures to reach down and up and down again. One needed to be small and built strong, rather like you, to survive as an Ancient Centran. Their skeletal remains confirm it."

Zell stared at him. Cid was an Ancient history buff. Who knew? Zell was a modern history buff. He preferred to read logs of the Galbadian-Estharian war, the rise and fall of the Dolletians, the founding of FH, the eradication of the Estharian tribes. And the popular history of the rise and fall of Pupurun as a social tool.

Zell had hidden depths. So, apparently, did Cid.

"Been doin' some reading in your retirement?" Zell asked.

"Here and there," Cid said. "Oh, look, Squall."

Squall landed gracefully at the bottom of the crater. Then he spoiled the effect by gracelessly taking Cid's canteen from Zell's hands.

"Yours or Cid's?" he asked. Zell waved him to Cid.

"Good," Squall said. "I have my own. But since you brought us down here, Cid, I'm taking yours." He took a swig, then wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. It was a careless, tired, attractive gesture. Zell almost forgave Cid for the stairs thing.

Cid seemed unaffected by Squall's sudden drop in professional manners.

"I brought one for each of you," he said. "Look, here's Quistis. Here you go, dear."

Quistis, apparently less passive aggressive than both of her counterparts, waved him off and drank from her own.

"I'm good, I'm good," she said. "The dust is going!"

She was right. It was a tiny thing now, just a fog over the ground in the distance. Zell was willing to bet that these were the aftereffects of sinkhole formation. But why did it matter?

"As you guessed, Zell," Cid said, "This is how the sinkholes form. Here and in the ruins on the North Island, but I wouldn't bet that there aren't smaller ones forming elsewhere on the continent, or even in the surrounding oceans. These are simply the only ones I've discovered. Each one tends to open at a different time. The ruins sinkhole opens at nighttime; this one appears at approximately oh-seven-hundred each day. We can approach when the dust dies down—"

"Why," Squall said flatly.

"Well, Squall, the dust does get into my lungs, and I'm not as young as I used to be, ha, ha—"

"Why are we bothering to approach at all?" Squall said. "Make the case for me, Cid. You're the client here. Your objectives are to figure out why this is happening. I decide the means. Maybe I think the best way to do this is to throw the problem at Esthar. This is their territory."

"Well, you really need to approach the sinkhole to answer that question," Cid said easily.

Squall's normal blank expression became downright mutinous.

"I'll just go," Zell said flatly, hoping to stave off any conflict. He didn't think Squall would stage a rebellion against their old Headmaster, but then you never knew with a guy like Squall. And if he did, Zell would have to go along with it because Squall was his friend and Cid was, well. Not. And someone working someplace like the Dollet Bugle would be sure to find out, and then it would be published, and Ma would be heartbroken, like she'd been over the whole No, No I Was Not Just Leading The Library Girl On And This Is Not A Phase thing; and also people would probably decide Squall was the next Seifer Almasy or something, and that was so unfair that Zell couldn't even make himself consider it.

Strangely enough, for all their eager defense of Cid the day before, both Squall and Quistis seemed annoyed at Zell for offering to do what Cid wanted.

"We don't have enough information," Quistis said.

"Cid hasn't given us enough," Squall said.

"What do you think I'm doing right now?" Cid asked, far too cheerful for someone whose formerly-loyal pupils were circling him like wary sharks.

They couldn't argue with that. Zell went cautiously over to the center of the crater. Then he stopped, stunned. And just kind of stared.

"Sinkhole" was an inaccurate term. Cid must have picked it to capture the fact that these things were apparently opening and closing suddenly all over Centra. But it was better described as a pit. No. Better to use a flowery, old-school instructor word. An abyss. The thing formed a perfect gaping circle in the center of the crater, like the black, hollow earth opening wide a hungry mouth.

And, once again, Cid had neglected to mention the stairs. There were stairs leading down into it, circling around and around and around into the depths of the pit until they disappeared from sight. A few had carvings in Ancient Centran script, like the stairs leading into the crater. But these stairs were not made of earth and rock. They were shining, iridescent, beneath a thin film of the black dust. They glittered with all kinds of strange colors: white at first, then shifting to reds and purples and blues, only in shades that Zell had no words for. They looked slippery, but when Zell crouched down and put a careful hand on the uppermost step, a wide and sloping thing, he found that it wasn't slippery; not really. It was solid and sure. It just happened to gleam. It took him a minute to figure out what that gleam reminded him of, what it called up in his mind.

No.

That made no sense. It couldn't be crystal from the Crystal Pillar. The Crystal Pillar was likely Middle-Age Estharian or something, right? Zell struggled to recall if he'd had any lessons on it. Either way, it wasn't Ancient Centran. And it was far, far more dangerous than a sinkhole. And it came from the _moon_.

Zell jogged back to where Cid and the others were. He relayed all this breathlessly. Then he added, "Alright, so. Does it summon monsters somehow? Does it call them up? From the earth? What's down there?"

"You see my concern," Cid murmured. "Suppose whatever's down there has the properties of the Crystal Pillar? Esthar won't use theirs. We think. But suppose it fell into the hands of the Galbadians. Or suppose the Galbadians came to believe that the Estharians had two. How would the world react? It takes very little to tip us into outright war; you all know that. There's a real possibility that we could set the world up for another stunning loss of life. For the third time in two mere generations. No. If there's power down there, it should go to Garden."

They stared at him.

"That's…bold," Quistis said, after a moment.

"SeeDs are peacekeepers at best," said Squall. "Guns for hire at worst. Sorceress control all the time. We're not… Not a power in our own right. We don't need a Crystal Pillar."

"I'm not trying to make us a world power," Cid said gently. "But, assuming that whatever these holes lead to is as bad or worse than the Pillar, it is our responsibility to make sure it doesn't fall into the wrong hands. Now. I did my best to prepare you all for situations exactly like this, correct? The unexpected. And though I wanted less famous SeeDs – it seemed to me that if we lost any of you heroes, word would get out rather quickly – now I believe Fate has brought you, the world's saviors, to me, here, on the verge of a great new adventure."

"You want us to climb down there," Zell said. "Even though we don't know what's there. Because it doesn't matter to you that it could be nothing, or something really dangerous. Whatever it is, Garden has to get it before anybody else does."

"Exactly," Cid said.

Squall shook his head and made an angry cutting motion with his hand. Apparently he wasn't into the idea.

"Thoughts, Squall?" Cid said. "You're not just here to follow my orders, you know. As you said, I'm only the client. You're the Commander."

For some reason, this made Squall look even angrier. He said, "Let me take a look at the thing."

Then he strode off, still holding Cid's canteen. They could make him out easily once he took his gunblade out and started walking around the rim of the pit; by now, the black dust was almost all gone. Zell wondered when the dust would start back up again. Assuming the sinkhole made as much dust leaving as it did appearing. The thing had to vanish at some point, right?

Squall began hacking at something with his blade. They could hear the clanging from here.

"Oh dear," Cid said. "That looks aggressive. Has Squall seemed more aggressive to either of you lately?"

Loyal Quistis sidestepped the question entirely. She said, "What I'd like to know is what he's hitting. Those stairs you described? Did they seem very solid and hard to cut to you, Zell?"

"Yeah," Zell said. "Also sorta gleamy. And priceless. Artifact-y."

"Oh dear," said Cid.

At one point Squall stopped, downed Cid's water, took out his own, and downed that too. Then he resumed his hacking. After about twenty-five minutes he came back, apparently satisfied. He'd lost Cid's canteen.

"I threw it down," he clarified. "I didn't hear it hit the bottom. I also took a sliver from the top stair." He held it up: a shard of crystal he'd carved off, no mean feat even if it had been a little shocking to see him attack the ground. "We'll send it to an operative in Esthar. They'll test it against the material of the pillar without alerting the Estharians. If it's a match, then we'll do this. Otherwise, no."

He looked annoyed to have had to come to a decision at all. After a moment, he added, "We should also probably get someone who can read Ancient Centran on the line. Those markings mean something."

* * *

There was exactly one person left in all the Gardens who could read Ancient Centran. There had once been five, but the Gardens had lost four in sundry tragic ways during the Ultimecia war, so now there was just this guy, who wasn't the biggest pain in the ass out of their former collection of Ancient Centran history nerds, not by a long shot; but that didn't mean Xu particularly liked him.

His name was Nida. He'd spent the past seven months training people to fly Ancient Centran technology with techniques improvised by the more modern Estharians. He was polite and inoffensive most of the time, but if you caught him on a bad day he could bitch endlessly about his job, because the Estharian manner of doing things wasn't authentically Centran enough for his tastes.

Xu usually looked at him blankly and said, "Yes, Nida. Estharian is not Centran. There is nothing that is Centran. Centrans haven't existed for years."

Still, to his credit, Nida worked hard and could follow orders. He was one of those useful souls that slipped through Garden largely unnoticed, only to appear when his particular expertise was necessary. And then vanish again when it was not. Then everyone else would cease to be interested in him, and only his technology students would be entirely aware that he was alive.

In a better world, he might have been made Commander. He was sharp. Smart. Firstly in the sense that he knew a lot, like every good Garden kid did. He collected information. Knew how to analyze and make sense of it. It was either that or go crawling back to wherever he came from: Timber or Dollet or Balamb or even Deling City, if he was one of those few rebellious souls that said screw it to totalitarianism and hitched a ride to B-garden (which Xu suspected he wasn't; Nida, for all his cleverness, didn't exactly scream 'rebel.'). So Nida, like everyone else at Garden, had never had a choice when it came to raw knowledge.

But he was also intelligent in that irritating, competent, slightly off way that this whole new crop of young, weird SeeDs were. Squall. Selphie Tilmitt. Irvine Kinneas. Zell Dincht. Somehow these people pulled it together and didn't fail you in the final hour. Somehow. Hyne only knew how.

Xu was old guard, compared to them. Not by much, but still old guard. Cautious. Careful. Assessing. She hadn't made a spectacular wartime debut. SeeD had just been a way for her to get out of Dollet, and then she'd discovered that she liked it here. She liked batty Cid Kramer. She wanted to see Garden thrive. The world – very recently torn between the Galbadian continent in this corner and the Estharian continent in this corner – needed Garden. Cid took missions from anybody, sometimes even from people who couldn't pay, throwing himself on NorG in a crunch, which had been stupid of him, but that was Cid for you. When people could pay, too, he sometimes turned them down. Sides didn't concern him. He'd thought B-Garden needed a kind of independent spirit; it had to separate itself from great powers; it had to be neutral, and, until the day the sorceress came, it ought to get by looking always to maintain a balance. Never siding permanently with anyone too powerful. Rarely did he take the same client twice unless the payment was very very good; without monetary reward, he seemed to think this was unpardonable favoritism. But when he did it, it was because someone else somewhere (usually Deling City) was employing former SeeDs or G-Garden cadets or something.

Somehow, even with running the school and paying out their salaries, which to his credit Cid never shirked from, he'd made a slim, slim profit. And he'd also, inexplicably, fucked the world order. The defenseless backwaters of the universe, places like Dollet and Timber, needed Garden. Or else they would have been steamrolled, assimilated, eaten by Galbadia, gone the way of the Ancient Centrans. B-Garden was essential to their survival.

And now B-Garden needed their only SeeD who knew Ancient Centran. He'd taught it to himself. Probably after teaching himself some of those useless made up languages out of high-flown fantasy novels with elves and gnomes and lions and things; he seemed like the type.

"Steps to an unknown underground cavern," he repeated, as Xu explained the situation to him. He sounded thrilled. Actually thrilled. The very thought of being swallowed up by the earth made Xu claustrophobic, but Nida sounded delighted. "Possibly the origin of the myths of the Nether Rippers, or the Duchy of Lost Children! Or else a genuine igless dollia ritua." Whatever in Hyne's name that was. Xu didn't do Ancient Centrans. She did trashy lit, a secret pleasure, and also pop-science books, because they were light reading with a bearable intellectual edge.

Nida continued, "Or a ssemetria. Can they photograph some of the carvings and send them to me? Or are you—" here his voice rose a few notches, like even contemplating the possibility was just too wonderful to bear, "Sending me out there?"

Hope colored his eyes. He sat taut and straight and nervous, the anti-Irvine Kinneas, practically vibrating at the notion of being ordered out to the buttcrack of the world so that he could help them decide whether or not to trick Esthar out of some weapon. That might or might not exist. On Esthar's rightful land. Squall had sounded like he didn't like that thought of all this when he'd explained it to Xu during their vid meeting. Possibly because he had high-profile relations in Esthar, and maybe also some weird honor code thing about taking missions there.

Squall was adorable sometimes. And by 'adorable', Xu meant 'what the hell, Squall.' How on earth did he think Garden had gotten their hands on most of their GFs? Did he assume every single one came from nearby Balamb? Because actually they'd always had a Take First, Alert the Appropriate Authorities Never approach. Xu had only made SeeD three years before him, and this had been one of the first things she'd bothered to learn about Garden's mysterious inner workings. Where it all came from. The GFs, the money, all of it. And the answer was shady places, shady Shumi, and more shady places. Cid and Edea Kramer had literally made something out of nothing with Garden. Magicians, both. How? By creeping into unnoticed places, gathering up the unnoticed kids, finding the unknown sources of magic and power…

They used all that power well, that was the thing. Or better than Deling City and Esthar would have. It was best for all these bright minds and all this power to go to Garden. Otherwise what was it there for? To be sacrificed to the war machines of two oft-despicable empires?

"No, I'm not sending you out there," Xu said offhandedly, sorting through the papers on her desk until she found the photos Squall had sent over. Nida deflated, absolutely crushed. She only vaguely noticed. It hadn't even occurred to her to send him until he'd mentioned it; she suspected Squall wouldn't appreciate it, for one thing. There were exactly four other SeeDs Squall worked well with; everyone else was a little unnerved by him, because he talked not to them, but sort of around them, in a grim and resolute way. Their nervousness tended to annoy him. In response, over the past few months he'd brought no less than eight older SeeDs close to tears, probably accidentally, without even really trying, simply by force of frustration and sheer non-personality. That was just Squall's special touch with the Command position.

Nida might have been weird, but he didn't deserve that.

Also, he hadn't been trained for it. He had standard combat training like everyone at Garden, and he'd passed his SeeD test. But his chosen curriculum had focused on tactical support, not field missions. And Xu didn't like to send many untried, inexperienced people out. It was too risky. It introduced too may unknown variables, wild cards. She didn't like wild cards. She had enough of them to deal with without adding Nida to the mix.

Xu finally found the photos. She shoved them at Nida.

"Translate, then report to Squall. I want you on it around the clock. This is time-sensitive. You can send everything you find over to him as you find it. No waiting. Waiting gives Esthar time to discover us on their territory."

The alternative, from what Squall could tell her, would have been to head to the Centra ruins and work there first. They had to tackle that sinkhole at some point; it could very well house anything that the first did. But that was on disputed territory and they could at least make a legal claim to it, so Xu would have to test the waters with the various powers to see what the reception to such a claim would be. Plus there they would have to work nighttime because of the nature of the sinkhole at that particular site, and that was bound to be more dangerous. Better to try and get a handle on what they were dealing with in the Kashkabald first.

"Oh, this is high Centran," said Nida, almost breathless with glee as he studied the photos.

Xu had no idea if this was supposed to have some kind of relevance for her. She raised an eyebrow. Nida didn't pick up on the question therein. He just stood and saluted and rushed out of the office, clutching the photos to his chest like they were precious. Which, she supposed, they were. To him.

As long as his work was good and he didn't jeopardize anyone's safety, she would tolerate him. She wasn't unfair. The Trepies aside (and, honestly, if you joined Garden to get a look at Quistis's tits and not to do your Hyne-damned job, Xu had zero pity for you), Xu rarely let her personal dislike color her assessment of SeeDs and cadets. She didn't like a whole lot of people, sure. But there had really only been a handful of people at Garden that she'd hated; and she liked to imagine that even then she could have been magnanimous, given the right circumstances, such as their profusely apologizing to her, and also begging and humiliating themselves and also surrendering all claim to their undeserved positions on the Disciplinary Committee.

She was flexible. She was no Squall Leonhart. She could bend and work with others. And people might make the mistake of thinking she worked forSquall, on his behalf, but she didn't. She worked for Garden. And she worked with whoever she had to work with.

Even if they occasionally brought unwanted attention to the place. Which some of them did. Had, for the past few months.

After Nida had gone, Xu surveyed the week's news. This was a thing she did sometimes. Usually when Garden's crop of Ultimecia-defying heroes weren't around. Like right now.

They were all good SeeDs. She reminded herself of this. Again. Over and over again. They were all good SeeDs, even if Squall was unstable and also apparently **Addicted to Performance-Enhancing Substances?** Yes. Hyne. Of course. The substances were called GFs. Next.

Rinoa (she collected Rinoa's because she had to keep abreast of sorceress info, not because Rinoa was in any way a SeeD) was still the greatest danger known to man. Xu was aware. She had a good few people working on how to detain and kill Rinoa should Rinoa ever go crazy and make a move against Garden. But she didn't think this outcome was likely, because Rinoa was already pretty crazy, and mostly it came out in stupid campaigns like Save The Ruby Dragons. Next.

Selphie Tilmitt was still apparently grieving, so wasted away by the attack on Trabia that she couldn't get out of bed. Xu had to wonder if these people had ever met Selphie Tilmitt. Next.

Quistis's parents. They'd gone from ignoring and belittling their daughter to becoming hyper-Trepies. They were awful, awful people. The actual Trepies kept inviting them into Garden; this was why the actual Trepies had to go. People like that, complete leeches, grandstanding jerks who sucked the life out of someone they were supposed to love - those people hit Xu the wrong way. Cid used to tell her that she was allowed to make one dumb judgment call a month if she did her job well the rest of the time. This was hers. Screw the Trepies, and also the Trepes. Next.

Irvine Kinneas was sleeping with people again. Hyne the Profane, couldn't these people find anything new to write about? She knew more about Kinneas's sex life than was necessary, far far more than she'd ever wanted to know. Now she knew that—

Huh. Xu flipped to the five page spread in the middle of the magazine.

"Hyne the Divine," she actually said out loud. Then she opened up her Garden mail and dashed off a note to Kadowaki.

**Re: SeeD Kinneas**  
Kinneas will need a psychological evaluation as soon as he comes in, counseling for at least three months. Ref. to legal for contacts if he expresses interest in a suit and would be better for his mental health, but it will not be backed by Garden, would be individual matter, make that clear. Pass him on the eval at all counts, administer blind, send actual results to me.  
Xu

She put the magazine on her desk. She hadn't realized she'd dropped it in her lap. She had. And she almost didn't want to touch it. She wanted to throw it away. She didn't. She put it in the file she was devoting expressly to monitoring these things.

Something in the back of her mind reminded her to dash off a second email, this time about psych evals for the Trepies. She did this mechanically, almost without thinking about it. She was thinking about bigger things. Garden.

Garden did not have a sterling reputation everywhere. Plenty of ordinary households across the Galbadia continent and even in their own Balamb backyard disliked them. They were considered a disruptive, disloyal, warmongering bunch. And Garden didn't just upend the status quo on an international scale. It also funneled money into the pockets of people who didn't have any before. Gave skills and a start in life to kids who otherwise would have died at 17, as part of the Galbadian war machine or else executed for being young and angry and defiant in Timber or Dollet. This budding, unpatriotic Garden nouveau riche (though really it was more like a comfortable Garden middle class; not that many people hit the really high SeeD ranks and got the big gil) didn't sit well with some people.

And yet the place also had its staunch supporters. Some people adored it for exactly the same reasons others hated it. Children across the continents dreamed of coming here and making SeeD, making something of themselves. Because of those children, Garden had gained prestige over the years. Not as much as it deserved. But enough to get by. And, even if in some corners it was still plebeian, unromantic, honorless, and tacky; lately it had taken a sharp rise in status, what with their defeat of Ultimecia.

And now it was taking a nosedive again. Xu could almost kick herself for not foreseeing it. A bunch of weird, awkward, mostly-unhappy orphans who didn't know how not to be taken advantage of to some extent – how were they supposed to live up to the heroic ideals of every nation in the world? Or for that matter any nation in the world? They couldn't. They just couldn't.

Garden kids were soldiers and fighters, yes. But many of them were not cut out to be worshipped. Any hero worship that rolled in for them would come up against their rampant memory loss, a great deal of parental abandonment, no shortage of insecurity…

At some point, the worship would turn to revulsion. You'd get stuff like this. Xu was no great friend to Irvine Kinneas, but she felt for him, on some level. The world had him in its sights, and it wanted to shoot, because people living in staid Dollet, in ravaged Timber, in oppressive Deling City, in destroyed Trabia – they liked a good character assassination. It distracted them from how small and terrible their own lives might get.

Xu decided to call in on the Deling City mission. She usually let her field SeeDs be for a good twenty-four hours before checking in; Cid had almost never checked in, and Garden had been none the worse for it most of the time, so it wasn't like there was any reason for her to do it beyond the fact that she was a slight control freak. Only now there was a reason. In addition to wanting a status update on the mission, Xu wanted to know if Irvine had seen this. And perhaps had a mental breakdown.

She buzzed Selphie, who was senior to Irvine by about two weeks and also one rank above him, which put her in command in every respect even though Xu hadn't assigned command, because their group tended to just ignore her and sort it out between themselves whenever Squall wasn't there to boss them around. Selphie answered right away.

"Oh, Xu," Selphie said. "You are not going to like this."

Then Selphie explained. And no, Xu did not like it.


	7. Chapter 7

What had happened first: they'd gone to a small and overcrowded café, a bustling place with mirrored walls and golden hangings and waiters in stiff collars. Rinoa had wrapped a bright scarf around her head and obtained some sunglasses, which for some reason were the It fashion accessory in Deling City. Had been for a long time. Probably because they were expensive here, since they were manufactured mostly in sunny places like Winhill and imported in, but also because they were completely unnecessary given the constant Deling City nighttime. It was still morning here, and it was still night. Sunglasses? Useless here.

Deling City being what it was, a girl like Rinoa could be expected to own at least fifteen totally superfluous pairs of sunglasses. She had given Selphie a neon green pair and Irvine some sleek wraparounds. They looked the ultimate in Deling hipster chic.

Rinoa took incognito very seriously, since she was by the now the most easily recognizable face on the planet. But she was very fair-minded about it. Irvine and Selphie had told her they wouldn't mind if she wanted to use her powers, go invisible. But to her this remained unthinkable. If even one of her friends was risking potential discovery by the press, or by a SeeD-hating contingent of the Galbadian army? Then Rinoa, too, would undergo the risks. It was only fair.

So instead of invisibility, Rinoa had invoked her Middle Trabian spell. They wanted to talk without being overheard, but she didn't know a spell to make them inaudible to all but each other. So Selphie had suggested trying to recreate the strange fluke that had infected them all two months ago and left them perfectly able to speak and understand an unknown dead language. It worked.

Selphie loved this spell. She loved the strange, wonderful sense of suddenly thinking differently. Boom! There went your brain. And now you had a new one. You suddenly had highly specific words for some very odd concepts: the sensation of leaving your body behind and becoming one with Hyne's magic, for example. The nostalgia one had for the eternal connectivity of all beings that had existed when the world was young. The ability to exist without contemplating past or future.

It was obviously not Middle Trabian. They just pretended it was, so that Rinoa wouldn't get upset. But the language was somewhat heavy on the ks. It put one in mind of Ultimecia.

It was sorceress-speech.

Oddly, Selphie's GFs loved it. Ifrit and Doomtrain perked right up as soon as Rinoa performed the spell. And Irvine went quiet, a little stunned, like Siren was doing the same. Probably Rinoa's Alexander and Leviathan liked it also. But Rinoa said nothing to indicate this. Instead she got right down to listing everyone she knew who'd been in the library at the time she'd sensed magic use. It read like a who's who of Deling City's elite. These were people whose very names seemed more genteel, more beautiful, fell more sweetly on the ear than just about everybody else's. Alkonet, Baymoss, Spaiss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta, Betel, Calaminth.

There were first names in there, too, but the surnames were more interesting, because they corresponded to Deling's Minister of Foreign Affairs, the Interim Commissioner, the Treasurer-Appointee, and so on. Where they didn't, Rinoa would often put in that such and such was related to some bigshot on the patrilineal. Spaiss's father was Secretary of the Interior. Ruta's, the head of the Cultural Affairs Cabinet. Selinum and Calaminth's, actual genuine honest-to-Hyne Delings, so it was safe to say that whatever their official jobs were, they commanded far more power than anyone else would have in the same positions.

"Alright," Selphie said, once they had the list in front of them. "Put down the library staff as well."

"Oh! I didn't even think of them," Rinoa said. She put those names down too. In faux Middle Trabian, so that to everyone but them the writing looked like strange blocky doodles, not actual writing at all.

"We should get them out of the way first," Selphie told her. "They could tell us if anyone else was there that day. And it would be better if it were the staff, right? For us. If it's one of your classmates, then we have a problem. Because if they're violating the agreement then either we have to break it to some Deling bigshot that their kid is ignoring international law, or else the Deling bigshot already knows and is in on it."

That latter option wasn't impossible. Just messy and horrible and a political nightmare. A situation tailor-made for SeeD, really. But they wouldn't jump straight to that. They'd eliminate the easier suspects first. Go slow about it. Methodical. Careful and calm the whole way through. Not Selphie's preferred method of operating. She liked explosions and danger. But Xu had told them to keep this low-profile.

"We'll sneak into the library!" Rinoa said. "Lock up the staff and hijack the computers. Get the staff names that way – they won't give them up if they recognize us – and see the access pass data list. You guys can do that. You have the training, right?"

Wow. Assaulting librarians? Not low-profile.

"We do have the training," Selphie said. Then, a little sadly, "We also have the training to just ask."

"And I know enough about Gryphon that I think we'll be able to get the information we need right away," Irvine added, somewhat mysteriously.

Rinoa blinked at them both.

It seemed to Selphie that sometimes Rinoa forgot that, just because SeeD could theoretically topple whole governments and carry out assassinations and hack into every data system save Esthar's, that didn't mean SeeD always would. Stuff like that was often more trouble than it was worth. If they got really flashy about it, started going around advertising everything they could do, then they'd become even more provoking and threatening to the world order than they already were. And then who knew what they'd have to defend against? Galbadia would attack Garden straight out if they thought SeeD posed as much of a threat as SeeD really did. Deling City strategists were not known for holding back militarily, even if at present they were hobbled by recent world events.

The only reason they'd held back so far, as far as Selphie could tell, was because for some people Garden had nothing to do with defeating Ultimecia. The papers still treated Garden like a fancy charity school and less like a military powerhouse. Credit for any recent derring-do went not to the organization as a whole, but simply to the new orphanage gang, in slightly uneven shares. 50% or more to Squall. 40% spread out irregularly among his support team: Irvine, Selphie, Zell, and Quistis. And then about 10% to the new sorceress, who was expected to have gained her powers by toppling the old sorceress anyway, because sorceresses, everyone knew, didn't play nice and were inherently threatening and would always be a problem.

But as long as it looked like SeeD was containing Rinoa (which, it had finally come out, was the whole point of SeeD in any case: to take the problem of the sorceress out of nice people's hands), like they were just a bunch of unruly babysitters sacrificed to the world's greatest magical threat, then the public would tolerate Garden.

And just as she'd given Caraway exactly that impression, so too did Selphie give it to the librarian at the Gryphon Library.

"We would appreciate your help," she said, leaning over the front desk so far that she was basically balancing on her hands, her feet dangling back over the edge. The librarian blinked. "We believe a threat against Rinoa may be coming in from G-Garden, and that somebody may have trailed her here a week ago. Could you possibly check the access past list for us? Just to make sure there's nothing suspicious."

Rinoa's librarian was the opposite of their warm, smiling Library Girl back at Garden. He was an insectile, praying-mantis-like creature; the kind of person you could imagine being crushed by accident between the pages of a book and then trapped there, flattened and skinny, for all eternity, until only a bloody imprint on the pages remained. Tall and spindly, wire-frame glasses, indeterminate age. Rinoa's magic-sensing power had written him off as their mystery caster; Selphie had questioned him obliquely about different kinds of magic and agreed that this was a sound conclusion. But he was still useful; he could give them a more complete picture of who else had been there that day. He blinked, looked unhappy to find Selphie so close all of a sudden, and said, "I can assure you that the kinds of persons who enroll at G-Garden never set foot on the Gryphon campus—"

"I have. Three floors, two wings," Irvine said.

"I—I beg your pardon?" said the librarian. He regarded Irvine with the same upper-crusty disdain Caraway had, only there was a slight tinge of fascinated horror as well.

Possibly he read the gossip rags.

Selphie became annoyed at this and propelled herself forward a little more, until she was centimeters from his nose. The librarian grimaced. Her wrists protested, but not by much; she didn't weigh much and they could support her weight for a little bit more, plus this was for a good cause. Namely, freaking out an asshole who clearly thought he was better than her boyfriend.

She also took a minute to remind herself that while she was here in Deling she should remember to murder Rill Tremlett.

"Two wings of stacks on three floors," Irvine was saying, "A star-ceiling reading room on the top floor, twenty-four individual study rooms in the back of the building, newspaper archives in the basement, school archives in the attic, private lecture hall with Estharian jade-inset fireplace donated by Vinzer Deling after the war with Adel, six computer rooms, reading garden with statues of famous alums, this really big staircase," here he extended a hand at the massive spiral staircase just behind the desk, "And a hidden back staircase that connects to a tunnel underneath the basement that then connects to the rest of the campus buildings."

"She told you that!" said the librarian, pointing an accusing finger at Rinoa.

"No," Rinoa said, stunned. "I didn't, actually."

"We'd get farmed out to do bodyguard duty for these kids sometimes," Irvine said, shrugging. "We're younger and better looking than soldiers, we all learn how to drive at age twelve, we can research and pre-plan routes better than any ordinary citizen, we keep our mouths shut about everything we find out or else Martine would have had our hides for betraying client secrets; and, hey. Sometimes we'd even sit exams or write papers so they didn't have to."

The mantis face went red. "A Gryphon student would never cheat—"

"No, they really would," Rinoa said. "What exams did you sit?"

"Introduction to Para-magic," said Irvine. "Plus a few governance seminars. And I turned in a paper on the theory behind Guardian Forces once; that was fun. I got to raid your resources on GFs. We didn't have nearly as many at G-Garden. My client just gave me his access pass so I could get in here to do it. And the funny thing is, it had a photo on it. But as long as I looked like I belonged here, this guy here never once checked to make sure the photo was mine."

"That's right. It must have been you," said Rinoa, pointing at the librarian. "You've been here since I started going here."

Sputtering from the librarian. The mantis face got so red that Selphie hopped off the desk, because possibly this guy's head would explode, and while she had a dark intellectual curiosity that made her want to see that happen, she didn't particularly want to be in the way of the blood splatter.

Irvine nodded. "You were the one whose job it was to make sure I matched the ID being swiped. In fact, I remember you pretty well. I could probably testify to it being you."

"And I have to wonder," Selphie finished, "What people like General Caraway and Minister Alkonet and Secretary Spaiss would think, if they found out you were letting just anyone into their kids' private playground?"

They had him cornered.

"We're gonna need that access pass list," Selphie said. "Even though I'm pretty sure it's not gonna be that helpful. What with you not doing your job and all…"

The librarian scowled. He retreated to his computer and printed the list.

"Thank you!" Selphie said brightly, once she had it in her hand.

They turned to go. Irvine gave a polite tip of his cap to the librarian, which was somewhat undermined by the fact that they'd just shaken the guy down, orphanage-gang style. Rinoa, Selphie reflected, was really getting the hang of being a member of the orphanage gang. She would never be a SeeD – that was raw power and military precision. But being a member of the orphanage gang was just as good, because _that_ was trusting your teammates' instincts, having their backs at all costs, and bullshitting like a pro if it came down to that.

"Hey," Selphie whispered, putting a hand on her back. "Nice work."

Rinoa said, "Thanks, Selph—"

Then she stopped. Just stopped at the foot of the library's massive spiral staircase, right underneath the big, glorious, Dolletian glass monstrosity of a chandelier. Her whole demeanor changed. Her face looked worried. Irvine and Selphie stopped too, to see what was wrong with her, and in that instant someone else came in through the wide double doors in front of them and said, "Rinoa!"

It was a girl.

She italicized 'Rinoa' when she said it. Selphie could hear her doing it. It was in her ultra-genteel voice. Not just Rinoa's regular name, but Rinoa's name said with patrician significance, almost over-enunciated. Rinoa herself did this sometimes when she talked, but she seemed to have trained herself out of the practice overall. It only came up to emphasize points that Rinoa felt more morally grey, more callous minds might gloss over. This girl did it as a matter of course, like she'd been taught that any word she chanced to utter might be so important that she had to emphasize it.

She was tall, nearly six feet. Athletic, broad-shouldered, but with a slim frame in that way Galbadians liked. Her hair was fair, like that of an old Dolletian princess or an Estharian lady warlord, her eyes an indeterminate pale grey. Her face could only be Galbadian, like Rinoa's, but she didn't have the odd delicacy about the mouth, or the uncommon warmth about the eyes. So without her height and coloring she would have been no great beauty. Deling City shop owners and hoteliers had those same features arranged in basically the same way.

"Oh, Missy," Rinoa said, blinking. "Listen, we're kind of busy—"

"Rinoa, you're back! I'm so glad! And who is this? Is the Commander here, too? He seemed like such a nice boy, nothing like what the papers say—"

"No, no," Rinoa said, "Listen, Missy, I— We—"

Missy looked once to Irvine, once to Selphie, and settled on Selphie. Specifically, she put her hand on Selphie's arm, with a kind of odd fluid kindness. Selphie suspected she should find the action overly-familiar, but she couldn't, because Missy seemed very aware of their height differences, and stooped a little to make up for it, and smiled. And while she seemed wary of Irvine, she still grinned at him and said, "Oh, it's so nice that you've brought along a Galbadian this time. You know I was dying to meet him. And you, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. I think you're so strong."

Incognito or not, Missy had apparently identified Irvine right away, and put together who Selphie was. So much for low profile.

With the hand that wasn't holding Selphie's arm captive, Missy reached into her bag for her access pass. Her thumb covered the first part, but Selphie caught her surname: Spaiss, which made her a Deling heiress on the middling to high level, with not one but two genuine Secretarial parents. She also caught Missy's middle name, Abcynthia, which indicated that these parents were stunningly cruel people.

She said, "Rinoa, I'm so glad you've come by, because I thought I was all alone, and, you know, there's nobody here today. Everybody in class A is going out tonight, and I'm the only one still doing the silly governance paper because I was transferred in after you left, so I'm always behind, and—"

"How do you know they're not already here?" Rinoa said suddenly, apropos of nothing.

Selphie approved of this question; they had to figure out where some of these people were if they were going to question them later on.

"They've all messaged to tell me," Missy said, dropping her pass in her bag and fishing out a vidphone instead (high end, one of these new ones that took advantage of the increase in planetary radio function, but backwards compared to the perfected Estharian model). She held it up, like Rinoa could peer through and read all her messages automatically. Which was something that, Rinoa being a sorceress, Missy probably assumed Rinoa could actually do.

After a minute of Rinoa not doing this, but instead just staring at Missy with a kind of puzzled look, Missy passed her the phone. Then she said, very seriously,  
"I wanted to talk to you anyway."

"That's nice," Rinoa said. She sounded uncharacteristically short. Not herself at all. "Listen, I have to do something. You can call me later."

This was not good SeeD thinking. If you had to question someone, and they practically opened themselves up to you, then you let it happen. Good SeeDs didn't spit on the blessings of Hyne and all that. Rinoa was learning how to conduct herself like a SeeD, but she still wasn't quite there. So Selphie overrode her. Selphie said, "Actually, Missy, we were wonderi—"

"I don't have your number!" Missy insisted.

"Pretty sure Caraway's stuck it in the directory," said Rinoa.

But then, apropos of nothing, Missy said, "You don't have to be afraid of being a sorceress, Rinoa."

Rinoa blinked. Selphie blinked. Even Irvine, slouching against a column, straightened up and shot them both a weird look, blinking. This had come out of nowhere. It was unusual, strangely direct for someone who had probably grown up surrounded by Deling City double-speak. And it was said in an oddly bland and honest way, with no verbal italics that Selphie could detect. And it was beautifully perceptive – it cut right at the heart of what Rinoa was dealing with these days. Squall had indicated that he felt Rinoa's Deling friends were all barbed speech and ugly gossip, not real friends at all, not that he was any kind of expert on the topic. But maybe he'd been wrong.

"I mean," Missy continued, seeming uncomfortable, "When you were here. Everyone kept bringing up Adel and all that. And that awful other one. Edea—"

"Ultimecia," Irvine corrected. "Edea's not a sorceress anymore, actually, and she's—"

"Responsible for the death of our president," said Missy, waving one long-fingered hand. "But that's obviously not you, Rinoa. Those women were irrational, degraded, wild—"

Wow. Unkind words about Matron aside, Missy seemed to be trying for a compliment, maybe? But she seemed to be trying wrong. Reminding Rinoa what sorceresses could turn into was maybe not the best way to go about this.

"I—" Rinoa began.

"You were raised right here with us in Deling," said Missy. "And we might have had our differences of opinion, but honestly. You're a good and civilized person. Everyone else knows it, too. They're just like that, you know. They're just trying to bring you down. They've been very strange since Ruta's sister took up with these silly G-Garden people, all GF talk and—"

Oh, jackpot. Thank you, Missy. Perfect, wonderful, beautiful, exactly what they'd come for. Selphie let the Matron talk drop (and, anyway, she was somewhat cold on Martron herself; yes, it was Matron, but then there was the ruin of Trabia to consider). Selphie could have hugged Missy.

"What was that, Missy?" she said, waggling her fingers in front of Missy's face to get her attention.

Missy blinked.

"GF talk," she repeated. "That Headmaster Martine squirreled one or two GFs away, I think? In secret. And Ruta's sister met this G-Garden boy who had one with him, and they're all aflutter with it, because you know none of us uses para-magic. She's probably meeting with him right now. I don't think it's appropriate. Para-magic is so… It's for soldiers. And backroom brawls. I think they're all a little fascinated, though. And jealous of poor Rinoa. Some girls would die to be a sorceress. It's so odd. I mean, it's one thing to meet up with a Garden type and, and…"

Missy trailed off, as if suddenly aware that she was speaking to two Garden types.

"…go slumming?" Irvine suggested. "It's fine. Tell us about the GFs."

"Yes," Rinoa said, oddly urgent. This was the thing about non-SeeDs. Sometimes they couldn't keep their cool. "But I think we should maybe go—"

Go? That made no sense. Missy was proving to be a valuable informant. They should stay, more like, and see what else they could get out of her.

"About Ruta's sister," Selphie said to Missy, talking over Rinoa. "Was she here last week when Rinoa came by?"

"Oh, she's always here," Missy said.

"Like right now!" Rinoa said. "Maybe she's here right now!"

"No, no," said Missy. She brought her phone out again. This time she bothered to actually show them the messages. One, from a Tulip Ruta, simply stated: _can't study today, with my hon Yyl Majesdane. ;)_

"That's probably the G-Garden cadet," Missy said disgustedly.

"Okay," Rinoa said. "Fine. We know its Tulip."

Irvine and Selphie stared at her. This was coming perilously close to giving up the game, suggesting to Missy that they were here for a reason, letting anyone know that they were here to do more than investigate G-Garden.

"The thing is—" Rinoa said.

"Where's yyiiil whatever?" Selphie said, speaking over her again. "This place they're supposed to be at? See, the funny thing is, Missy, we heard that there were some threats against Rinoa coming out of G-Garden."

"And if we could talk to Tulip's cadet that might orient us," Irvine put in. "Sounds like he's not big on the establishment there."

"Of course," Missy said, brightening. "I'd love to help—"

"Guys," Rinoa said, desperate and not at all subtle. She was distressed enough that she made Missy stop short, stop helping. Instead, Missy put a concerned hand on her arm.

Irvine stared at Rinoa. Selphie stared at Rinoa. Never before had it been alarmingly clear that Rinoa had been raised a slightly clingy Galbadian heiress and not, in fact, a SeeD. She was carelessly throwing them off their lead, just after Missy had so helpfully dropped it in their laps.

Irvine shook his head slightly, warningly. Selphie mouthed: _Rinoa. Not now._

In response, Rinoa erupted into a hail of feathers. And vanished.

* * *

It occurred to Irvine that maybe sometimes sorceress magic could go haywire. And that if and when it did, the sensible thing would be for the sorceress to try and warn her friends.

He could see the exact same thought occurring to Selphie at the exact same time. Specifically, several milliseconds too late. Rinoa had already been replaced by feathers.

_A poor friend you both make! _Siren snorted.

"Shut up," Irvine thought at her. "You don't have friends, period. What d'you know?"

As soon as he thought that, it occurred to him that he hadn't had friends, period, until he'd met Rinoa and reconnected with the rest of them. And so Siren thought the same thing, and became just a touch more smug, which was really unwarranted; she was smug enough as she was.

Missy cleared her throat. She looked appalled. She was a good looking girl (a bit wary around Irvine, but who wasn't, with what people were printing about him these days?), if not quite on Selphie's level, and she'd been kind to Rinoa, so whatever Irvine thought about her school or the kinds of people she probably hung out with, he put it aside.

"It's—" he began, as calmly as he could, "It's alright."

Was it?

Was Rinoa alright?

So her powers were acting up. She'd gone invisible, probably against her will. That was all. She was still there, right?

_Or something terrible has happened to her_, put in Siren, echoing his thoughts.

There was a crash behind them. Irvine whirled around. Some unseen force had knocked a pile of books from the librarian's desk onto the floor. The librarian looked affronted. Missy looked even more startled than she had before. They were so focused on the books that they completely missed seeing one of the white feathers blanketing the floor suddenly drift up and smack Irvine squarely on the nose, three times.

Then, for good measure, it tangled itself in Selphie's hair.

Rinoa was still with them. Just invisible.

"She's teleported," Selphie said suddenly.

Selphie had a remarkable tendency to pull complete lies out of thin air when called upon to explain difficult situations. It wasn't anything SeeD had ever taught her to do. It was just who she was. As a child, she'd been much the same, stealing Zell's toys, putting glue in Quistis's ponytail, tying Squall's shoelaces together, appropriating Sis's dolls, locking Seifer in the beach shed, and then, innocently, concocting very elaborate fabrications that Matron hadn't really believed, of course not, except that half the time she had. Selphie was about as restrained and understated as Zell was, as a Behemoth crashing into your back was. Often she was clumsy and she didn't think things through, and she had an intense preference for violent means when understated stealth would have served just as well. But the girl had a fairly good track record with the bald-faced lie.

Particularly since Irvine always backed her up on it. What could he say? He wanted to see her succeed.

"We're actually investigating a report that some of the dissatisfaction in G-Garden might be boiling over into outright sorceress hate," Irvine said, pulling from Selphie's earlier lie to Caraway.

"We told her that if it turned out there really was magic involved, she should teleport right away!" Selphie said. "Yep! That's what we said!"

"Good thing she remembered and took us up on it," said Irvine.

"She's the best," said Selphie.

"Follows orders like you can't believe," said Irvine.

"What a trooper," Selphie said. "So sorry that sometimes we forget that."

"We really don't give her enough credit," Irvine said.

There was a brief, sudden _hrrrmph_ from near Irvine's ear.

"You must take terribly good care of her," said Missy. "I'm so glad SeeD exists to control the sorceress power. Imagine poor Rinoa without you."

Another _hmph_, this time louder.

"Did you say something?" Missy said to Irvine.

"Just clearing my throat," Irvine said. "Listen, Missy, about your friend. Tulip Ruta? Like Selphie was saying. Can you tell us where exactly she and this cadet of hers might be? I might even know him, so if we can get him to talk straight—"

"Tell you? I can show you! You're so good to Rinoa; it's the least I could do for a friend of a friend!"

Irvine held a hand out towards the door.

"Lead the way," he said gallantly.

But as they walked away, there was a brief tug at his arm.

"I'm staying," came Rinoa's voice, hissed and low, from somewhere just behind him.

Irvine whirled around to where he thought she was. What? he mouthed in her general direction. The librarian, scowling and looking miserable, either because he'd had to deal with SeeDs or because someone had just become feathers with no warning in the middle of his library, or else because of the scattered books on the floor (it was not this guy's day), saw Irvine do this.

"You should really pick those up," Irvine told him hurriedly, tipping his cap. Then he turned his attention back to trying to communicate with the air where Rinoa was maybe standing at the moment.

"I have to do something here," Rinoa whispered. "Meet me back at Caraway's. I think the problem is bigger than we think it is!"

Before Irvine could figure out how to communicate with an invisible person without looking completely crazy, there was a brief shifting of the feathers on the floor, as though Rinoa were passing over them as she walked away. Then the ID pass-scanning machine at the base of the stairs rattled, like someone was climbing over it with no care for the damage they might do. Then he thought he heard, faintly, the kinds of footsteps a hundred-pounds-wet girl might make as she ran up the stairs.

Away from her friends.

In the middle of a mission.

"What in Hyne's patootie…?" Selphie muttered, at his elbow.

She'd put it together, too. Whatever was wrong with Rinoa? Had made her run away from them. Which wasn't very Rinoa-like. Rinoa did not abandon ship; it wasn't her nature. Rinoa took loyalty and teamwork seriously.

On the other hand, it wasn't like anyone could accuse Rinoa of not being overconfident and harebrained.

_Remember that time she kicked you down a flight of stairs_, Siren put in.

"'Course I do," Irvine thought. "I just thought of it. That's why you can think of it."

_Can I have that? _Siren said. _Good times. From my perspective. Not yours._

"Are we going?" Missy said, having completely missed Irvine and Selphie's baffling exchange with the Invisible Girl. "I do have a paper to write, but I'd much rather help Rin out, because—"

Irvine put Siren out of his mind. Er. Hypothetically.

"As loyal as you are beautiful," he told Missy.

"We can take my car," Missy said, looking prim and flattered.

Selphie rolled her eyes.

"Fine. Let's go," she said. "We can…collect our things at Caraway's—"

Irvine said, "Our malfunctioning—"

Selphie said, "Slightly puzzling, wayward—"

They finished together, "_Things_."

Rinoa.

"After we've sorted this out," Selphie added. "Mission always takes priority."

"How very military," Missy said mildly. It was hard to tell if she approved. But then she was giving them a ride, so Irvine figured her hesitancy around SeeD could be forgiven. It wasn't standard SeeD procedure to take rides from strange tall heiresses. In the first place, girls like that didn't come around often. In the second, you never knew if 'ride' could be code for 'trapping you in a confined Galbadian military vehicle and shooting you like a dog.' But Missy's car couldn't have trapped them. It wasn't built for trapping. It was built for showing off.

It was an F-type Thrustaevis, sleek and shining and silver-blue, all modern lines, designed after the Dec Arto movement that was in vogue in Deling City right now. After the functionality and solid ugliness of Garden transports, it looked like some grandiose drug hallucination on wheels. Irvine was not a car man by any means – he had too many vices to add another, more expensive one to the list – but this thing would have their humble Balamb mechanic back home paying Missy just for the chance to work on it. To touch it, even.

The inside was so clean and spotless and beautiful that one could have mistaken Missy for a Garden kid, raised into impersonal military precision in all things. There were no small touches, nothing special or unique to reveal Missy's character or interests. There weren't even the obligatory fuzzy dice hanging from the mirror.

"It's new," Missy said. "I only just received my permits from the Commissioner."

After Ultimecia's takeover, to drive in Deling City on a full-time basis you had to pass fifteen tests, including a full background check and a blood test and a test of patriotism. These cost, on average, sixteen hundred gil paid out to the state. The car needed to be registered and insured by the Deling Insurance Co., equipped with trackers to be activated in case of suspicious activity, and it was, per the law, partially owned by the government, who could seize it at any time, for any reason. Officials and heiresses made up the bulk of the city's drivers. The Car Rental had shut down. The bus now checked ID.

Deling was now a city of pedestrians, for the most part.

Selphie, who'd snagged the front seat, was saying, "Now, give us the layout of yyill…"

"Majesdane," Missy said, "Of course."

She outlined what she knew about the place. Irvine committed it to memory, interjecting where he thought he could add some useful fact about the G-Hotel district, and mentally shooed Siren away from the information he was taking in. When Missy had told them all she could, she and Selphie lapsed into a friendly discussion about fashions in Trabia versus fashions in Deling. Irvine would have been an able participant, but for the fact that Selphie had sent him a baleful look over his earlier flirtations, so he mostly kept quiet and stared out of the window for the duration of the ride.

His Garden papers listed Deling City as his hometown. It wasn't, not really. He'd been shuffled from the orphanage to Deling to G-Garden in the span of six years, and yes, most of that time had been spent in what was, on paper, Deling City. But it wasn't Deling City. Not really. It was the Southeast outskirts. That was very different. Blocky, military construction. Miles of garbage dumps and factories and timber-cutting yards, a nameless industrial zone crossed with rail tracks and highways, army vehicles clanking by every hour on the hour, taking parents to the missile site or a training ground, down into the desert for their job at the prison, across to the coasts to serve patrol in the unlikely event that Esthar woke up again someday and attacked from the West.

North of Deling was less polluted, more beautiful, but so overgrown with monsters as to be uninhabitable. In the days of Holy Dolletian supremacy, it had been peopled by the Acenath, an empire that far predated even Dollet's, that had once waged war with the Centrans. The Acenath had possessed a glorious flourishing nation that reached down into where Deling was today. Accordingly, they had some descendants among modern Galbadians, darker-skinned than the rest, with beautiful names like Mosshill or Skyfin, Seagill or Wingflower. But they had angered a sorceress coming out of Dollet, the all-powerful Domitia, whose knight had been one of the most bloodthirsty high dukes of the Dolletian empire. In short time, they'd fallen. Their cities had disappeared overnight, been left barren and empty of people. And it was said that their lands were cursed, now and forevermore. Their last ancient king's name had been struck from the history books; his tomb laid to ruin. And the surviving Acenath became Dolletian.

So too had, over time, the Safra of the desert, the Nah warlords of the midlands, the Kalevan of the Northern peninsula, the Brais who'd once dotted the land near Winhill, and the old Timberi foresters and frontiersmen. Until it made no sense to call the empire Dolletian. Domitia and her knight had consumed the continent. Their realm, though it would eventually break back into scattered city-states, could only be called Galbadian.

And the vast industrial suburban stretches between Deling and the rest of the continent were, to Irvine's mind, the most Galbadian of Galbadian places. Useful. Functional. Ugly. It was where the great machine of the Galbadian army lay, spaced out and separate from ordinary citizens, but always just a day's ride away. Where Vinzer Deling's secrets and worst abuses were buried, alongside valleys of soot-blackened trees and red deserts stained by cheap car oil and para-magic effluence. Irvine had grown up there, but you didn't really grow at all there. Nothing grew. Moving forward in any way was a choking process, gasping for air among the smog and the banging, intrusive activities of the army, ignoring the results of military orders and basic facts and all facets of smothering reality. The people living there – some seventy-five percent of Vinzer Deling's subjects – went to work for the army, scraping by a kind of existence. And then, to live, they pretended they weren't Galbadian at all. They reached out, desperate, for some clear spot of fresh air and freedom in any small way they could: old books, pretty faces, fantasies of old Dolletian cowboys living free among the Safra in the desert, religious ecstasy, sex.

Galbadia was not a happy place. Irvine had willingly traded away a million memories of it. And held on, anxiously, to the clean orphanage, to the wide and endless Centran beaches he'd played on, to the little girl who'd pushed him into tide pools only to rescue him from the sea crabs minutes later.

Unlike people unlucky enough to be born in Galbadia, Irvine had roots elsewhere. Far away, in someplace Deling City couldn't touch. In this way, he could understand Rinoa's love for Timber. Timber might be humble, might be poor. It didn't have the glamour Deling City did, nor did Edea's orphanage. But neither did they have the banal ugliness, and neither they so stifling.

"Though to be fair," Irvine thought, as they crossed the bridge out of the mansion district, "You'd never know how horrible it can be to be Galbadian if you go by Deling City."

_It's actually pretty here_, said Siren.

"And fake," Irvine thought.

Deling City was the front, the cover, a star on a grat shit pile, blinding you with its brightness so that you couldn't see what lay underneath. It was an architectural and artistic marvel: a mélange of all the different kingdoms Vinzer Deling's distant ancestor and his sorceress had conquered. Old Dolletian castles, mansions paneled in glossy imported Timberi mahogany, beautiful apartment complexes with courtyards and fountains in the style of the old desert palaces, high iron gates with the impressive pyramid-symbols of the Acenath, parks studded with shining cobbles mined near Winhill. Not to mention neon from the outskirts, antique green glass blown by Nah descendants out in Dollet, and beautiful squares and townhouses designed by Timber's infamous and famously artistic betrayer, Baron Shasnamun.

It was a jewel of a town. Even the smog of the outskirts seemed to collect around it in such a way as to offer the city not a cover of hideous, polluted clouds, but a kind of sublime eternal night. Cyrel Leyephs, poetical nephew to Ursula Deling II, had claimed it wasn't smog at all, once you reached Deling City. Instead the nighttime here was a living thing, a breathing monster, a Guardian Force whose eternal task was to protect the sacred heart of the new Galbadian empire. A pretty thought. A nice image to drop, on a dark Deling evening, when you were walking some cute girl upstairs to her room at the G-hotel and wanted to impress her.

But it was smog. Just like the reality of Galbadia was miles and miles of misery between here, Timber, and Dollet. So too was the reality of the poetical nighttime simply, unmistakably, smog.

"It's so glamorous here," Selphie was saying as they passed the presidential palace. "In Trabia we don't have castles, or—"

"The interior was modeled on the original Dolletian imperial palace," noted Missy.

"I don't remember seeing anything like that in Dollet," Selphie said.

Irvine cut in. "'Cause of Catkin's Men, Selphie."

Selphie turned around, stared, raised an eyebrow at him.

"Catkin's men?" she said.

"You mean you don't know?" said Missy, aghast. "Don't they teach you any Galbadian history in Trabia?"

_No, _Siren supplied, drawing on what she'd learned from Irvine. _Probably not. Because it's mostly propaganda_.

"No," Selphie said bluntly. "Of course not. Why would we care? We're not Galbadia."

Missy sniffed. But then, evidently, she decided Selphie ought to learn the story anyway. It was an important story.

Or at least that was the party line.

* * *

Zsinma Catkin, if you went by the Galbanization of her original name, had been Dolletian on her papers, daughter of a Nah glassblower in reality, and descendent of warlords in her mind. In her head, it was said, she'd imagined herself the heir to some grand ancient kingdom. She'd been an upstart like that. Rebellious. Born arrogant.

At age fifteen, she'd away from home and trekked across her people's ravaged ancestral lands (not yet industrialized, but overrun with Galbadian army deserters, no place for anyone to live unmolested) to Deling City. There, she'd taken up the newspaper life. She was no great fan of the government. In those days, this was not a killable offense, merely a jailable one. She served time regularly, a week every month in the Deling City PD's cells, until she was twenty-one. She used the time to write angrier, ever-more-critical articles.

It was the era of Ursula Deling IV. Ursula was a weak Deling. The blood of dukes and sorceresses had gone very thin in her. She was harmless and sweet, but very mad. She lived sequestered in the presidential palace with aides and doctors, issuing raving proclamations that rarely impacted or affected the populace. She feared that the eternal nighttime was not smog, but a sign of Hyne, a curse on the city. Therefore she spent hours locked indoors, surrounded by sun lamps, addicted to brightness. Her government rarely legislated at all; the city was lawless—

_Not the worst it would become_, put in Siren, silently giving voice to a stray thought that had crept up into Irvine's consciousness as he listened.

-and her brilliant daughter, Vincenza III, was still a child, unable to control the family's unruly subjects.

Catkin delighted in the chaos in Deling City in this time. She became a byword for dissatisfaction, sowing discord among the gangsters and thugs proliferating on every corner, and criticizing the palace at every turn. She had the ear of the common man, and she used it to advocate for the end to their continent-wide alliance. Dollet, Timber, Winhill, the desert, the midlands – all pledged loyalty to Deling City. And why? For what? Deling City, Catkin argued, couldn't control itself. So it was time to throw off its yoke. There was no use anymore for Galbadia. Better to go back to being their own nations, once and for all.

Now, Catkin's childish anger, her fantastic desire to disrupt the order of the Galbadian Alliance, had some very real supporters. Immigrants to the city of Deling, two-faced hypocrites from Timber and Winhill who could only survive on Deling City's dime, flocked to her. And the unthinking local man, annoyed at his tax dollars being spent for the benefit of these disloyal places, similarly believed her reasoning was sound. Pioneers out in Galbadia's Centran outposts were already halfway to completing her plan, declaring their Deling-funded communities new nations, urging separation from the mother city.

But shortsighted Catkin had never predicted Adel.

Brutal, deformed, uncontrollable, and wicked, the sorceress had torn through the Estharian continent, crushing whole populations that had opposed her. She'd driven the Estharian Shumi to their cousins in Trabia, obliterated tribespeople who'd traded peaceably with Esthar for centuries, and was now making incursions into Centra and even across the oceans, to the Eastern and Southern reaches of the Galbadian continent. Her hunger for power was insatiable, her evil unmatched.

And the only force that could stop her was a united Galbadia.

So callow Catkin was proven wrong. The twilight of the empire wasn't upon them. Far from it, by some miracle, the good people of Galbadia realized they had to band together. Vincenza III, at the young age of twenty, saw her mother carted off to a care facility, a small sacrifice to make for her people. And then she and her brother Vinzer set about reforming the army, routing out dissident cowards who wouldn't fight, and making plans. For what? The Sorceress War, of course. The Delings were visionaries, and they knew, even before the war had been formally declared, that they had to unite the continent, make of all these squabbling city-states a power that could withstand Adel's magic and superior technology.

Catkin was routed from her newspaper office and offered a chance to do some good, to join the army. But she chose instead to evade her military duty. No great surprise there. She retreated not to Dollet, which was the cultural if not political heart of the empire and therefore a patriotic town. Instead she went to Timber, a place in very real danger because its rail lines stretched across the ocean to Esthar (a throwback to earlier, simpler times, when the Timberi had traded far and wide), and holed up to wait out the war. Her warlord's anger, her fury at Galbadia, hadn't abated. She took up with a crew of similar-minded folk, newspapermen, and preached Timberi separatism even in the face of Adel.

While a few sensible Timberi understood Adel's threat and cleaved to Galbadia, Catkin sowed discord among the majority. She peppered her newspaper – ostensibly a politically neutral outlet with a focus on travel and the arts – with 'warnings' against Galbadian supremacy and what she felt might happen should Deling City seize control after the war.

_And what no one ever tells us,_ put in Siren, _Is that she wasn't wrong._

To keep the peace, Vinzer Deling, acting for his sister, cracked down on Timber, urging them to see the light and unite with the rest of the continent. And a few did. Timberi soldiers fought against Adel, even if many were conscripted unwillingly, and Timberi blood was shed in Centra and the South just the same as anyone else's. But even then, some Timberi remained bitter. Angry, prideful, stupid. They saw themselves as too good for the rest of the continent. They preferred to ally themselves with wretched, cruel Esthar, those distant cousins of theirs in the thrall of the sorceress, rather than bend the knee even once to greater Galbadia.

These became Catkin's men. A network of backstabbing, honorless Timberi, they fought alongside good, united Galbadians in many a regiment, but all the while they were sending information back to Catkin, and Catkin? Was sending it across the rails to Esthar.

_Her real flaw is that it wouldn't make a difference, in the end. Esthar or Galbadia, Adel or Deling_, said Siren.

"No, she was pretty sure even Adel wouldn't be so bad. What Missy's not saying," Irvine thought, "Or what Missy doesn't know, maybe. Is what Vinzer Deling was doing to Timber, to get those men to fight. It's why he built the damn D-District in the first place, really. To hold their families, and to set up a hostage group, captive Timberi to build his weapons, craft his bombs. "

_…!_

"Yeah," Irvine thought. "It's a pretty story, the way she tells it. But you have to see both sides."

So Catkin orchestrated a brilliant traitor's arrangement. A web of informants who had little love for the country protecting them, who sold themselves, like callous mercenaries, to Adel's spymasters. And for a time it worked. Catkin herself, undercover as a normal reporter, went undetected; and her men became fanatics in her name, determined to use the war to end the Galbadian alliance at all costs, even at the cost of takeover by Adel.

Until a middling general by the name of Caraway (possibly they knew him?) should intercept one of their communications. Grim and quiet and not terribly personable, Caraway was nevertheless a die-hard patriot, a man who dreamt of United Galbadia and who became committed to tracking down each and every traitor and seeing them punished.

Caraway's men killed a fair few, those that resisted. But overall they were merciful. Caraway's sweetheart was Timberi by birth, and the general had a soft spot for her countrymen by extension. So Catkin and the bulk of her men became political prisoners. Loyal Dollet, Catkin's old hometown, agreed to host them on the far north coast, where they could do no harm. Then, after the war was over and the threat of Adel gone, they could turn over the prisoners to Deling City for a trial.

Catkin's men spent the latter half of the war in the strongest fortification Dollet had to offer: the old Holy Dolletian castle that stood where the continent met the Northern peninsula. Conditions there were probably better than they deserved. The castle was ancient, but secure and imposing. It still recalled the days when the statesmen of old, dukes and kings, princesses and sorceresses clad all in red, had argued forcefully with the people of Dollet for the dream of a united Galbadian continent. It was a fitting place to put these traitors. Not a cruel place. But simply one that would remind them, at every step, that they were fighting against an inevitability.

It is said that, when Adel mysteriously vanished and Esthar retreated, Catkin's men didn't celebrate. They stormed their guards, demanded to be set free. They'd lost, but they wanted to take Galbadia down in any way possible. The Dolletians radioed Deling City, terrified that Catkin and her men would escape and wreak havoc on their small seaside town.

Vincenza Deling herself came out with a force of soldiers a hundred strong. They sought to put down the rebellion, and take Catkin and her men to the D-District prison for trial. But, somehow, perhaps through some illicit connection, Catkin had gotten hold of a bomb. When Vincenza arrived and attempted to talk sense into the rebels, she detonated it, killing Vincenza, herself, her men, and anyone in a five hundred meter radius.

The only reason anyone knew what had happened was because the residents of Dollet had seen the smoke go up, and pieced together the story in the days afterwards.

_So Catkin died rather than go to the D-District? _said Siren.

"Can you blame her?" Irvine thought.

And so now all that was left of the original castle was a hole in the earth, and a great expanse of blackened, sooty dirt in the North, stretching out in all directions. A piece of original, beautiful Galbadian heritage was lost. Vincenza, most brilliant of the Delings, was gone. The heads of Dollet and Timber submitted themselves to a loose association with Deling City after this, almost more out of humiliation than genuine thanks for the Galbadian army's defense of them during the war, and the alliance settled back into an uneasy peace for the most part, interrupted only by bands of rebels who were stupid enough to see more than death and betrayal in Catkin's horrible, honorless suicide run.

* * *

So that was Missy's story. Selphie thought she could detect a bias.

* * *

When Raijin found himself pulled back into his own head, something odd happened. The sorceress wasn't there. Another girl, one with perfectly nice brown eyes, who looked like the first otherwise, but older, was sitting in her place. She nodded to someone just out of sight. She said, "Shoo, shoo, bad bedside manner."

It took Raijin a few moments to process this.

Every bone in his body hurt. Before he'd been expelled from his own mind, he'd been hurting for so long that he'd no longer really felt it. But now he did feel it. It came roaring back. The pain from his ribs, wrists, knees, and ankles. His left cheekbone, which felt bruised and raw. Where the skin on his back had come off. Where he'd nearly bitten through his tongue.

"Hey," said the new girl. "She's gone. It's just me. Listen. Listen. I think I know a way to get Seifer back."

Raijin was so disoriented that for a minute he couldn't understand why they'd want to bring Seifer back. They'd only be bringing him back here. He worked his way around the gumminess in his mouth, and said this.

The girl rolled her eyes. "So he can rescue you, and the two of you can go get Garden, and then you'll all fix this place. Duh."


	8. Chapter 8

"I've got to tell you, Missy," Selphie said, once Missy had concluded her story, "That hardly seems like an impartial account."

Missy shrugged. She said, "I fly the Cactus Jack, Selphie Tilmitt of Trabia. The truth as I see it is Galbadian. And the fact is, things between Galbadia and Timber are much more complicated than Rin probably makes them out to be."

"She's half Timberi. I think if anyone sees the whole picture, it's her," Selphie said, defensive on behalf of her friend.

"She's tugged in two directions," said Missy. "You try seeing everything when you're that split in half."

Not that Missy saw everything, Irvine thought. She clearly didn't feel it was at all strange that Vincenza Deling had disappeared just as Vinzer had come of age to take the presidency himself, on Dolletian lands where it would fall to Dollet to sort things out, and with a parcel of starving, isolated Timberi prisoners to take the fall for the whole thing.

Mighty convenient, that.

Vinzer Deling must have had some fine operatives back in the day. SeeD couldn't have set up a better result for him. _Martine_ couldn't have.

They passed the G-Hotel. Missy took them down a side street, then pulled up to the curb and set her permits on the dashboard before stepping out of the car.

"This is it," she said, gesturing at a building tucked behind a small cobbled courtyard a few meters away.

It was an elegant little building, perfectly circular and domed, almost like a bank, but with few accouterments, no faux-Acenath columns, only one large round doorway leading inside. The sign for a perfume shop hung in the courtyard, but when Missy stepped through the door the salesgirl at the counter took one look at her and waved them through to the back. They descended a spiral staircase hung with globular, eerie green lamps and notches lit by some strange blue crystal. At the bottom, a dark-haired man in nondescript tan manned the door. He nodded once to Missy, demanded to see Selphie's papers, which she produced (false, supplied by Xu, but then he didn't know that). Then, oddly enough, he simply waved Irvine through.

Oh.

_You've been here before_, Siren said.

He didn't remember it. At all. It must have been with someone, someone in the know, someone he also couldn't remember right now.

"Do you have the memory?" he thought at Siren.

_I have mostly random monster battles,_ she informed him sulkily. _And one or two interesting things, but not very many. That's all you said I could have. I'd like something a little more riveting._

"What's the deal with that?" Selphie asked Irvine, as they passed down a long, dimly-lit corridor that sloped down, down, down.

"Ah," Irvine said, running a hand through his hair. "Well—"

"He's been here before, obviously," said Missy, from in front of them. "Though I wish he'd told me that before I offered to drive you here."

"I don't remember," Irvine clarified, more for Selphie's benefit than hers.

"Oh, were you drinking?" Missy said, sounding unsurprised. "Well, you are Galbadia's most famous person right now, just as she's Trabia's. So naturally you're going to want to let loose a little bit."

The way she said that, blithely, easily – not the part about Irvine letting loose; Irvine hadn't really let loose since the end of the war, since he'd met Selphie again and his friends again and been given a proper job and steady pay and a reason to put up his hat at night and go to bed, at peace. No, the part about Irvine being Galbadia's most famous person. That shocked him.

Because it really hit him for what seemed like the first time.

Rinoa was probably equally famous. Infamous. They were both infamous. And Irvine had always enjoyed a certain low-level infamy. But not like this. It was one thing to be the wisecracking loner, irresistible to women, there at night and gone by daybreak. It was quite another to see this fantasy blown up, distorted, transformed into the byword for a depraved lifestyle.

He thought of Rill Tremlett. He'd put Rill out of his mind for the time being, put the pictures out of his mind—

Siren said, _You gave them to me. Don't worry. I was incensed and humiliated and angry on your behalf._

This...this was the thing. About Irvine. And his memories. Right after the war, his friends had wanted to know why he didn't tell them right off, why he'd seemed upset over their forgetting, which of course they couldn't help. Why he'd made a secret of their time at the orphanage, a memory that they all could have shared and that belonged to all of them.

And the truth was, he'd assumed they'd given their time at the orphanage to the GFs. Knowingly. On purpose. He'd assumed that they'd figured out that you could give away memories deliberately. Why not? He had, and he had less experience with GFs than they did. So he'd simply believed that they, like him, had willingly and consciously traded away their pasts. Specifically, those parts of their pasts that hadn't meant anything to them and hadn't been valuable. For Irvine, the most valuable moments in his life had been the orphanage, so he'd kept those. Whereas for the others - cheerful Selphie, team captain Squall, perfect SeeD Quistis, and beloved son Zell - maybe the orphanage hadn't meant as much. Maybe Irvine hadn't meant as much. So obviously they'd just given him away.

He'd been so ashamed when the truth had come out: that only he really understood what was going on and that only he had tossed away parts of his life. That the others were just hapless victims. So he'd covered it up at first. His memory trade-offs. He'd just told them that as far as he knew there were no GFs at G-garden, he'd only junctioned until recently, that was why. Why he alone remembered them.

Not because he'd traded away bits and pieces of his life to keep them.

Only now this lie loomed large and obvious. There were G-garden cadets advocating GF use among a highly patriotic subset of the most expansionist empire on the planet. The most dangerous city on the planet, from Balamb Garden's perspective. The city Irvine should know a lot about. And maybe if Irvine had been a little bit more honest or a little bit less reckless with his memory trade-offs, he could have helped them avoid this mess.

He wondered which GF Ruta's cadet had a hold of. There weren't many he could think of that hadn't eventually made it to Balamb. Atomos? No. He could swear Xu had assigned that one to a SeeD cleaning up monsters in Esthar. Of course, he would have known for sure if he'd just bothered to come clean to Xu. It was one thing to lie between friends. Another to be dishonest to a Garden superior.

He thought of Rill Tremlett, of the images in the magazine.

Maybe he deserved to have his past blow up in his face. He felt sick, uneasy, unhappy that anyone, from people he loved, like Selphie, to people he'd just met today, like Missy, could walk to the nearest shop and purchase a five page spread on his past, his stupid decisions, his romantic failures, his vulnerability, and every inch of his prepubescent self. He felt something he hoped desperately he'd never wrought on anybody else, not that he could ever know for sure with his memory as patchworked as it was: he felt contaminated.

Giving away his memories had always been a way to keep himself as pure and happy as he'd been at the orphanage. Carefree. Not weighed down. It was second nature at this point to pass off the overwhelming discomfort he felt in thinking of Rill to Siren. The moment it became a memory, he let her lay claim to it. Take it off his mind. But he couldn't keep it from intruding on his life again, not when it was plastered on the newsstands. And he couldn't erase the part of him that wasn't memories, that was just some lonely loser from the outskirts, and that would always, always feel the bile rise in his throat now, when he was reminded that his sexual experiences cost ten gil at the item shop. There was a core part of him that was angry and humiliated. And he could try to shove the memories of that humiliation at the GFs, like he'd done with Bexley, with his former lovers, with his worst moments at G-garden. But he couldn't get rid of his gut reaction.

And obviously he wouldn't be able to keep the world from shoving his worst behavior in his face.

"Irvy," Selphie put in at this point. "Are you alright?"

He tipped his cap. He was fine. Fine. Perfect.

This was probably another opportunity to be honest here, to let her know that Irvine Kinneas, the grown up incarnation of Irvine her friend, was a bit more cracked below the surface than he let on. But he didn't. He couldn't. The words dried up in his throat.

They reached the end of the corridor. The man at the inner door waved them all in after sizing them up and demanding a (very hefty) cover charge. And then –

A low cavern, painted with frolicking historical figures: naked Nah, sexually-posed Acenath. Many branching rooms off to the side, each dimly lit and warm and smoky, with people passing in and out, laughing. Someone was playing a tinkling melody at a piano, and in front of them a girl in nothing but nipple pasties was taking people's coats. The central room here was lit again by those strange crystals, and Selphie and Missy's faces became distorted, indistinct, strangely alien in the light. There was Tonberry dust on a table to their right, being weighed and parceled out as if it were no illegal substance, just some light recreation. From the cavern on their left came a party of people dressed up like Shumi, though they were clearly not Shumi. One dropped her robe to reveal a bikini, to shrieking applause and laughter

"I'll find you Tulip," Missy said, looking uncomfortable in her Gryphon Preparatory cardigan and schoolgirl skirt. "She's bound to be around here somewhere. You know, she's not a very upright girl."

"Isn't she? Shocking," said Selphie. "Well, at least she's fun."

Selphie was regarding the proceedings with some interest. Trabia wasn't known for its club scene. More for its scenic lakes and white-capped mountains and for healthy pursuits like skiing and ice skating and that weird old-person sport where you strapped flat baskets to your feet and tromped around in snow. Walking. That was it.

"How come you've never taken me here?" she asked Irvine, once Missy had darted off to find Tulip Ruta.

"I didn't remember that I'd even been here!" said Irvine.

Selphie poked him. "Well, someplace like it, then," she said.

It had never occurred to him. He'd thrown up a divider in his mind between wholesome, innocent, perfect Selphie and, well, every other relationship in his life, which had largely been conducted out of smoke-filled rooms like these, and which had ended abruptly when people realized he was a consummate liar and an emotional coward.

Luckily, before he could come up with something to explain this away, Missy appeared. She was dragging someone behind her: a long-faced brunette with deep-set green eyes and a sparkly green dress that probably cost at least 35,000 gil for its one square meter of fabric.

There was no G-Garden cadet.

Missy lurched over a drunk, giggling young man who'd stumbled into her path, and caught hold of Selphie's arm.

"I think they had a fight," she hissed. "Tulip and her cadet. Not surprising. They have nothing in common."

Tulip Ruta eyed Selphie and Irvine sulkily.

"These are Rinoa's friends?' she said flatly. "They don't look like they're from Timber."

Nice of Missy to try and provide them some kind of cover. Not strictly necessary, since they were already operating under a cover with Missy herself. But still. Good thinking. A cover story to cover the cover story.

"You don't seem like what I'd expect a Deling City rich girl to look like," Selphie told her chirpily. "Short skirts, dens of vice, _magic_."

"Our local soldiers and cadets use magic all the time," Tulip retorted.

"Some soldier or cadet get you into GFs?" said Irvine.

"Maybe," Tulip said. She pointedly examined her nails, clearly annoyed to be having this conversation.

Missy nudged her. "Tell them his name," she said.

"Why?" said Tulip. Then she narrowed her eyes at them. "Do I know you? You look familiar."

There was only so much new haircuts, a different hat, and some changes of clothes could do for them. Irvine and Selphie still had faces Tulip would probably see whenever she strolled up to the magazine rack at the Deling City train station. But they couldn't let that faze them. Irvine straightened up, put some no-nonsense, non-Kinneas seriousness into his face. He always tried to channel Squall when people identified him. The Commander's overall demeanor was so unlike Irvine that it usually threw people off balance.

For her part, Selphie only had to smile extra bright. No one ever reported her as smiling. She was from Trabia Garden; people assumed she stayed in bed all day and cried.

"Do you know magic use is forbidden inside the city?" Selphie said brightly, glossing over Tulip's question. "Funny, right? Almost like what you guys did to Timber."

Tulip rolled her eyes.

"Please," she said. "You people are—Why do you even care about my magic use? Why do Rinoa's friends from Timber give an Anacondaur's ass about my magic use?"

Missy stared at them, panicky. "Well, Tul—" she began.

But she was interrupted. Someone in one of the back rooms screamed. They heard the sound of shots, as if from a machine gun. Missy seized both Irvine and Selphie's arms, looking frightened, and Tulip Ruta seemed to blink out of whatever drug haze she'd been in, and turned for the door.

Which was barricaded. By Deling City soldiers.

"Oh, grat poop," Selphie said.

As SeeDs, they could technically be in the city. No problems there. But, per the ceasefire, there were only a limited number of things they could actually do here. What they'd told Caraway qualified just fine. It made them out to be bodyguards sniffing out a potential threat: normal SeeD behavior. But who knew whether sitting around in a (clearly illegal) den of vice brought them over the edge into prohibited activity?

Selphie, quick thinker that she was, grabbed Tulip Ruta with one hand, nodded to Irvine, and propelled them all in the direction of one of the rooms furthest from where the shots had come from.

"Is there a back entrance to this place that Missy wouldn't know about?" she demanded of Tulip Ruta. "Is the army doing some kind of raid on both ends?"

Tulip shrugged uselessly, looking terrified. Irvine had only a little pity for her; if this entire mess came down to her own selfish desire to see what being a magic-user was like, then she deserved whatever came her way. But Missy he really pitied, since the poor girl didn't have to be here. He manhandled her behind a nearby chaise lounge, garish and red, and put a finger to his lips, urging her to stay quiet in case the Deling military police burst into the room. She stared at him, shocked, but seemed to get it, and nodded. Then he turned to Selphie. There was a small hidden screen in one corner, painted with more naked figures, practically blending into the wall. Selphie noticed it at the same time he did and shoved Tulip Ruta behind it, because Selphie was essentially a good person, despite her dark humor and occasional violent streak.

So Irvine, almost unthinkingly, shoved Selphie in after Tulip.

There was no room for him. He whirled around, looking for some other form of cover. There was a low bar at the other end of the room, behind which people were crouching, scared. This would be the perfect place to get in some short-range shots in from, if the situation deteriorated to that point. Irvine strode across to it, reached it, went to climb over it—

And someone caught him by the shoulder, kneed him in the back, right where his kidney was, and pulled him down to the floor.

It hurt like Hyne's own curse.

Irvine blinked.

Fury Caraway stared down at him, disgusted.

Fuck.

"I expect I'll find Rinoa around here," he said, so slowly and deliberately and softly that it sounded like some threat out of an old movie, the knight making good on a promise to destroy all who opposed his sorceress. Which. The guy was talking about his daughter, so. Gross.

"This hardly seems like protecting her," Caraway continued, "Coming to a place like this. We received a tip that a G-Garden threat was here. But the only G-Garden cadet I'm seeing here is… You."

Well, they'd gotten the same tip he had, obviously. This was easy enough to clear up. Irvine opened his mouth to say this. Caraway kicked him in the side. While he was down.

Fucking _Hyne_. He kicked like his daughter did. Hard.

"If you've hidden an innocent Galbadian girl from a good family here," Caraway said easily, "I will have your head."

He was clearly talking about Rinoa, and thankfully Rinoa was not here. But suddenly it occurred to Irvine that poor Missy Spaiss was. He looked to his right, to where she was hiding behind the divan, almost on reflex, as if to reassure himself that she was fine, still undetected.

Caraway hauled him to his feet.

"You have a tic," he told Irvine easily.

"Excuse me?" Irvine forced out, still somewhat shocked by all the kicking. And kidney punching. And totalitarian crackdown-ing.

"A tic," Caraway said. "When I mentioned my daughter. You looked to the right."

Oh. Hyne the Divine. Caraway was a general now. But way back when he'd been a spy-catcher, too. So of course he'd notice your reflexes, your hidden movements, the things even you didn't know you were doing.

"Check behind that divan," Caraway demanded.

"Rinoa's not there!" Irvine said.

No use. Caraway's men kicked over the divan, and revealed a very terrified Missy. Poor Missy.

"Nice company you're keeping, Miss Spaiss," Caraway said. He sounded surprised, but that leached out of his tone quickly enough when he added, "Rinoa's influence, no doubt."

"N-no—" Missy forced out. "She teleported. Ages ago."

Caraway blinked. He probably had no idea his daughter could do that. To be fair, his daughter couldn't. It was just some lie of Selphie's.

Fuck. Selphie. What if Caraway asked after Selphie? What if he asked after Selphie and Irvine, stupid traitorous Irvine with his tics, led Caraway straight to her? Caraway was clearly not in a forgiving mood right now, or even in much of a mood to listen, and Irvine didn't like the thought of Selphie in the hands of a man like that.

Selphie was joy, and laughter on a beach, and the pure snow of Trabia. She was not there to be manhandled or kidney-punched. She was not what Caraway would undoubtedly classify her as: upstart Garden trash.

"Take Miss Spaiss to the Commissioner's office. Call her parents," Caraway ordered. Missy squeaked. She was led away.

"There was another one of you," Caraway said, after a minute.

And somehow, Irvine's brain – all those firing neurons he couldn't control – came up with the plan before Irvine's mind—that is, the sensible inner part of him that directed the GFs bargained with them, really controlled them, really thought its thoughts out properly – could offer any input.

It was a fairly simple plan. To protect Selphie.

_Oh, _Siren said, echoing this plan._ Of course I can take every moment she spent with you today. Not a problem._

And then, suddenly, Selphie was gone. Not all of her. Just her today. Whatever she'd done alongside him. Wherever she was right now. He knew she had to be somewhere, just as he knew she'd been assigned to this mission with him, had boarded the train with them yesterday, had doubtlessly reached the city at the same time he and Rinoa had.

There was just a vague, fuzzy block around all his memories today. He wasn't even sure what they'd discovered. He could recall everything Missy had said to him directly; he still knew they had a G-Garden kid running around with GFs. He could even recall Tulip Ruta's sulky face. But where was Tulip now? With Selphie? She had to be. Because her location was missing. It was in the wooly hole in his head, the one Siren had left behind when she'd yanked out his recent experiences with his girlfriend.

"Where is SeeD Tilmitt?" demanded General Caraway.

And Irvine honestly didn't know. He shrugged.

Caraway sneered at him, disgust etched into his features.

"You know, once I pulled you out of some trouble at the D-District," Caraway told Irvine. "It made sense at the time. Martine's notes on you said you had…connections there. I wanted to do you a favor, a nice Deling boy like you. Getting arrested would have been a blow to your poor father."

Irvine had very little sentiment for his adoptive father, so he shrugged again.

"Clearly I was too kind," Caraway noted. "You dragged my daughter back there anyway."

No, he hadn't. She'd kicked him down a flight of stairs, and then dragged _him_. But, taking the measure of Fury Caraway, Irvine decided he wouldn't reveal that because firstly he didn't think it would help him. Caraway clearly already thought Irvine was scum and there would be little changing his mind on that account. And, secondly, Irvine felt bad enough for Rinoa for having to deal with this guy all her life. She didn't need him making it worse by pointing out her misbehavior and making Caraway even more viciously overprotective than he already was.

"Take him to the D-District," Caraway said, shoving him at some soldiers. He was a very, very strong man, Irvine realized belatedly. You wouldn't think it to look at him, but he was. Irvine, six feet tall and no petite flower in terms of weight, was propelled backwards by the force of Caraway's push and practically shoved into the arms of his captors. He blinked, somewhat dazed.

And was stunned to see an equally dazed Tulip Ruta appear behind Caraway and a squadron of Caraway's soldiers. Seemingly out of nowhere. Just out of the lewdly painted wall or something.

"Um," she said. She sounded scared stiff. "SeeD Kinneas didn't do anything wrong. He was just meeting me here. To get a tip on the G-Garden cadet illegally using magic. The one that might hurt Rinoa. The cadet's name is Hobbs. Hobbs Worth." She smiled. An uneasy, frightened thing. Not a pretty smile. Lips parting, teeth firmly clenched in nervousness. Hesitant, afraid, so uncomfortable it looked like she was hiding shards of glass in her mouth.

_Hobbs Worth?_ Siren said._ Him?_

It didn't make sense to Irvine either.

"Miss Ruta," Caraway said, plainly aghast. "Well. I can't say I'm pleased to find two of you girls here. Same routine as with Miss Spaiss." He waved Tulip in the direction of one of his men. Tulip shrunk a bit, but went where he'd gestured. The soldier led her away.

"This one can still spend the night at the D-District," Caraway said, pointing at Irvine once she'd gone.

"What?" Irvine said, dismayed. "She just confirmed that I was only doing the same thing you are! Protecting Rinoa!"

"With the kind of people Rinoa brings home," Caraway said lightly, "You'd be spending the night in my house otherwise. I can't say I like that. And I think it's time I commandeered her little mission. She didn't need to hire SeeDs. I'm her father. I can look after her. And now that I have Mr. Worth's name, it should go smoothly enough."

Which. That still didn't make any sense. Hobbs Worth had been in some of Irvine's classes. Hobbs Worth was—

"Cast sleep," Caraway ordered.

Irvine didn't get to finish the thought. He was out like a light.

When he woke up, it was in a cell, and most of the muscles in his body hurt. Siren was buzzing excitedly in his brain for some reason, but Irvine didn't get a chance to pay much attention to her, because a very familiar face was staring down at him. An eternally-swollen face. Red. With thinning brown hair and a sparse brown mustache and permanent bags underneath the watery blue eyes, and a look of complete dissatisfaction.

"Caraway's ordered us to ship you back to your SeeDs in Balamb," Bexley said, by way of greeting.

Well. Hyne hid a ray of sunshine in every shitpile, they said.

"But not 'til mornin'," Bexley continued. "He said I could keep you 'til then. Which I will. We should talk."

"I'd rather not," Irvine said.

"You know what people are printin' about you?" Bexley said.

Well, he hadn't been thinking about it, but now he was. Thanks, Bexley.

"You know how humiliated I am?" Bexley said. "First you don't come home after the War—"

"It's not my home anymore," Irvine said. "It's a pretty crap home."

"Sleep your way across Esthar," Bexley said, ignoring him. "Dirty-minded like you are. Then you take up with this poor girl outta Trabia, who you're probably no good for. You fuck up the lives of the people around you, y'know. You did it to me. Gonna do it to this girl. Gonna do it to—"

Hobbs Worth. The next name on Caraway's black list. It flashed into Irvine's mind right then. He tuned Bexley out.

_You think Worth is in trouble,_ Siren said.

And Irvine did. Because. Because it occurred to him, right then, that something was rotten. Tulip Ruta had pegged Worth as some kind of magic user, their rebel right in Deling City; and Missy had given the impression, from what he could remember of the library and the car ride to the club, that Tulip's cadet was dissatisfied with the status quo. But that was wrong. It was off.

Hobbs Worth had never been dissatisfied a day in his life. He'd been the most un-rebellious, unthinking soul in G-Garden. A born follower, just how Martine liked them. Someone who never raised a fuss, who balked at no orders, who never thought for himself, who accepted everything Fate threw at him. The ideal Garden cadet. Irvine, an outsider who Martine had very much disliked, had thought little of Worth. Worth bent at the knee every power above him, to Martine and to his clients and to any Deling official he happened to meet. And as a result he'd always been rewarded, down the line. You scratch my back; I kill grats for you. The Deling City way. So no. This wasn't right. Worth had never had reason to be dissatisfied. Or to break the rules.

Their rebel magic user? Couldn't be Worth. Irvine was sure of it.

* * *

The decommissioned SeeD transport bobbed just below the waters off the coast of Dollet. It stayed there for some time; during the hours the Dolletians were most likely to discover it, the high fishing hours of the morning and afternoon. At the early evening siesta, in which the Dolletians all retired to their homes to nap and the streets fell empty, coincidentally the same hour in which Irvine Kinneas was being arrested by the Galbadian military police, the transport came to the surface. Cid had programmed it to arrive at this time. No one would be around to notice it.

The transport stayed put long enough to let off its passenger. This person stumbled out, limping. They left behind the blanket and most of the bandages. They took the battered long grey coat, and somehow wrapped it around themselves in such a way that it became a strange banner, a defiant flag fluttering behind them in the wind.

They went to the house of the sorceress. Very few people knew that Dollet's sorceress was a sorceress. She wasn't crazy enough to reveal it to anyone.

She simply went by Rexa, the Card Queen.

She answered the knock at the door and saw the coat first.

"You," she snarled. But then she caught sight of the person under the coat.

They weren't who she was expecting to see.

"Honey, you'd better come in," she said.

* * *

"Arrested," Xu said to Selphie Tilmitt.

"Yeah…" Selphie said. She was in a seedy bar in the outskirts. After putting the fear of Hyne into Tulip Ruta to get her to reveal the name of their SeeD cadet and to confess to Caraway in the process, in the vain hope that this might keep Irvine from being sent to prison, Selphie had stayed crouched behind her concealed screen for an hour, as the police arrested the people at the bar and all horrible totalitarian activity slowly died down.

Then she'd crept out of town in the vain hope that she might find a car rental that didn't report you to the government, so that she could head out to the desert. Because there was no way she was going to let Irvy rot in prison. She'd helped take down the old D-District. She could take down the new, rebuilt one as well.

"And Rinoa?" Xu asked, as if half-fearful of the answer. "I only ask because we have to keep tabs on her. Not because she's a SeeD."

"Er," Selphie said. "Still AWOL. Technically."

"AWOL," Xu said.

"AWOL," Selphie confirmed.

Xu said something that sounded impossibly romantic because it was in Dolletian-accented old Nah. But by now Selphie had known Xu long enough to realize that when she lapsed into one of her mother tongues, it was only because she was letting the Headmistress façade slip long enough to curse like a sailor.

"I'll negotiate with the D-district," Xu forced out, when she was done cursing. "You—you get back in the city. Find us our missing sorceress."

She sounded incredibly put-upon to be ordering the retrieval of Rinoa, a girl whose safety was, on paper, Garden's top priority. Off paper, Rinoa was someone Xu had attempted to flush out of Garden multiple times. She made no secret of the fact that she found Rinoa incredibly obnoxious.

Selphie preferred Rinoa to Xu. Rinoa was her friend; Xu was simply her boss. But she still felt a little bad for Xu. Xu had an uncompromising temperament and a thankless job. This was not a great combo if you wanted to cut back on work-related stress.

"Maybe Squall's mission is going better," Selphie said, by way of comfort.

"There's no way," Xu said, as evenly as she could probably manage, "That it could be going any worse than yours."

* * *

"This is the most boring mission I've ever been on in my life," Zell told Quistis, when they were staked out alone on the far side of the sinkhole. "And hot. It's really freakin' hot."

Quistis could concur on both points. They were doing very little today. Just observing, measuring the sinkhole, taking notes on the environment, photographing what they could, and relaying the images to their Ancient Centran expert back at Garden. After their experiences defeating Ultimecia, something like this was almost an extension of their vacation.

Except that no one ever went to the Kashkabald for a vacation. The Kashkabald in daytime meant skin-peeling heat so powerful you could actually feel yourself roasting. Occasionally, the thermostat here even climbed up to heat so stifling you thought your eyeballs might be melting in their sockets.

Squall, with the impersonal care of a true leader, kept offering her water in order to combat the heat. Zell did the same, though he probably did it less because Quistis was a valued member of the team and they couldn't have her dying of dehydration, and more because his mother back in Balamb had taught him that it was important to care about others, and that boys who let girls die of thirst deserved to be sharply cuffed on the back of the head.

Quistis didn't actually need that much water, though?

She was a Blue Mage. It took a lot to dehydrate her. She rarely felt hunger. She had a whole parcel of spells at her disposal, and apparently the ability to survive tough conditions came with the territory.

She'd discovered her Blue Magic when she was ten. A junk trader had come into town with a whole range of curiosities he'd picked up across the Galbadian continent. Necklaces of fire opals from the desert; curious books of genealogy from the weird Winhill area, where women took _men's_ names; antiquated tech from suburban Deling City; old magazines from Timber; and bizarre rocks, caked with dust and shaped like little people, from the Northern peninsula where the Kalevan had once lived. Quistis's adoptive parents had not liked her talking to people like this; they were Dolletian old money, which meant a good last name but actually very little money. Still, they'd believed she had to keep a distance from Dolletian no money, which was basically everyone in Dollet, and also everybody from outside Dollet until you hit Deling City, particularly trash like junk traders.

But Quistis had talked to the junk trader. She'd wanted to buy something. She'd had her own money by then. She'd earned it, because she'd always kept busy as a child. She'd been as unhappy then as she was now, as far as she could tell, but she'd discovered early on that working at something, filling up your day with things to do, could stave off moodiness and insecure thoughts. You just had to…tire yourself out. So that was exactly what she'd done. She'd taken paper routes, delivered fruit from street vendors to buyers at the radio tower, collected and sold seashells by the waterfront. Her parents were already slightly dissatisfied with her – she simply wasn't a lovable child, they said; it was good to be pretty, but something about this one's prettiness was just not lovable— so it was nothing to them if she disappeared for some time each day. So she had. In that time, she'd earned her pocket money as Dollet's go-to girl for nondescript errands. She could afford to purchase some junk, now and then, and she'd purchased one of those funny Kalevan rocks.

It looked like a little black stone man. The rounded top was his bald head. The vast middle was his barrel chest. The excrescences on the sides? His powerful arms. The notch near the top was his grin, something halfway between merry and sad. He'd seemed sad somehow. Quistis had liked him. He'd cost two gil.

She'd taken him down a side street after purchasing him, and come across the Painter Gang.

The Painter Gang ruled Dollet's streets. Until Quistis had come on the scene, they'd had a monopoly on just about every single child-friendly task you could earn money at. They ran childish card rackets, sold milk in the square, washed windows, and had once reigned supreme at the seashell trade. Once. Until Quistis had shown up. They didn't like her; she was, to their mind, snooty and horrible. And they were a band of backstreets ruffians who wouldn't make friends with her, perhaps because – Quistis struggled to pull memories that would make more sense of this, memories of herself younger and happier – sometime between Centra and her encounter with the junk trader, Quistis had lost her ability to really relate to or make friends with children her own age.

The Painter Gang cornered her and clearly intended to rough her up. Their ringleader was an older girl, sharp and dangerous, and she had a cousin and a brother and another cousin and a baby sister, and every last one of these was slightly more hard-edged and ambitious than she was, so Quistis had never had any idea how she managed to keep them under control. But she had. Possibly by constantly setting them on scapegoats like the pretty rich girl who thought she could muscle in on their territory.

So they'd come at her. And she'd clutched her little rock man, frightened out of her wits, and suddenly felt him grow very, very hot.

There was magic in him, somehow. Blue magic. Specifically, a very small defensive spell, which threw up a kind of shield in front of her, and the Painter Gang ran right into it, and smacked their childish heads, and blood dripped from their noses, and they screamed and ran to tell their parents, and before you knew it? Everyone in Dollet knew that Saffir and Lina Trepe's adoptive daughter was a Blue Mage.

Even Saffir and Lina Trepe, who consorted with very few ordinary Dolletians, somehow chanced to learn it, possibly because some of their less well-named but incredibly resentful neighbors had taken pains to tell them about it, wanting to see their faces when they learned that the pretty, well-behaved child they'd purchased was defective.

Blue Magic wasn't as bad as sorceress magic, obviously. But it was still magic. Inhuman. Not right. Below para magic, which was something for soldiers, who at least had the excuse that casting helped them fight Esthar. But blue magic… Blue magic was sure proof that the girl who possessed it might be a sorceress candidate. That is, she might have a tendency to go uncontrollable, savage, soak in the wickedness of Hyne's profane magical half.

Lina had gone to Quistis's bedroom that very night, which was a thing she never did, and had grabbed Quistis's hairbrush and begun to brush Quistis's hair, which was also a thing she never did. Which was a good thing. Because she hadn't been very good at it. She didn't brush so much as she pulled. Angrily. Hard.

"Do you know what Blue Magic is?" she'd said, as she did this.

Quistis had not.

"It's something the Shumi of the East had," Lina had told her. "Not something people have. Not even something the Shumi who live close by in the North have. It's for Estharian Shumi. Evil Eastern monsters. Do you know how it gets into a person?"

"Ow," was all Quistis had been able to say, because her hair was being pulled so often and so hard that at this point there were tears in her eyes.

Lina brought her mouth down to Quistis's ear. Quistis could see her face in the mirror. Lina looked very like she did, enough that people might have assumed she was Quistis's natural mother if she and Saffir hadn't run around telling them straight-out that Saffir had suffered injuries in the war, and they'd had to adopt. But Quistis's face had never looked as simultaneously gleeful and furious as Lina's did right then. Lina said, "Blue magic came into the human bloodstream when the Estharians went to destroy their local Shumi villages. And do you know what they did? Before they killed the Shumi, they found the Shumi's hidden women. And they raped them. And they forced them to give birth to the babies, to give to Adel so that Adel could devour their blue magic. And then—"

Here she yanked Quistis's hair particularly hard.

"I guess one or two escaped. And tricked the people who adopted them into thinking they were a nice, human, Dolletian child."

Quistis did look Dolletian. The original, best flavor of Galbadian. Blue eyes, Western-pale in their color, nothing like the black-eyed wickedness of the Estharians. Hair too fair to come from the rest of the Galbadian continent – it had to be from old Dollet. The whole package. But Saffir and Lina had always suspected the package was leaky or faulty; that the blonde wasn't properly golden but little too much like the wheat-coloring of certain savage tribes of old Esthar. And anyway they'd never made any secret of the fact that it was the wrong package altogether. Really they'd wanted a boy, who would be less open to receiving any magic of any kind, but the only properly blond, light-eyed Dolletian-seeming boy left at the orphanage when they'd gotten there had been such a horrible little ogre that they had no choice but to accept second-best.

Well, now second-best had proven to be completely worthless.

They'd called Cid Kramer and enrolled Quistis in B-Garden the next day. She would have gone to G-Garden, but for the fact that they knew people who sent their children there, and if Quistis had gone to school with those children they might have had to hear about her down the line, and they would have had to accept that she had not, in fact, evaporated into nothing as soon as they'd decided they didn't want her.

They'd changed their minds, in recent months. Really famous people like Fury Caraway had turned out to have magic daughters. It was in fashion now. And Quistis herself was now famous, on magazine stands, in newspapers looking very photogenic. Quistis was a household name, something one might be able to make money off of. It seemed her adoptive parents done just that. The Trepies had invited them to Garden just before Quistis had gone on vacation. They'd shown up in one of her classes, Lina in fur and Saffir wearing a watch that must have cost at least a few thousand gil. They'd tried to talk to her afterwards, she'd told them (keeping her cool all the while) that she was busy. Then some photographer who'd snuck past the guy at the gate had taken pictures, and Quistis had fled up to Xu's office, and then? She'd had a small mental breakdown.

Small. Very small. Not even tears or anything, since Quistis hadn't had a serious crying fit since she'd been eight and the Painter Gang ringleader had yanked off a good chunk of her hair in a skirmish.

"You're going on vacation," Xu had said, without bothering to look up from her paperwork.

"Yeah, I'll think about it," Quistis had said, her face buried in her hands. "I'll clock my time in at some point. But this month I still have a para-magic class to sketch out for Frecht; he can't plan his classes to save his life, and—"

"That was not a request," Xu had said. "I'll throw you out of here if I have to. Don't make me have people bodily escort you to the door. It'll make Squall storm in here in a huff like he owns the place. And then I'll have to put him on vacation." She stopped, considered this. "No," she said, suddenly blissful. "You know what? You're all on vacation. Oh. Oh, yeah."

This was the thing about Xu. It was hard to see her as a friend, a real friend, because usually she only helped you when it was convenient for her to do so, when it fell in line with what she thought Garden needed. That made her an able replacement for Cid, but not really someone you wanted to unload your deepest secrets onto. Even so, she somehow seemed to grasp that Quistis's life wasn't in the best place right now. And she had (buried deep, deep down) some sympathy for her. So she was helping Quistis out rather a lot.

"Hey," Zell said suddenly, looking up from his vidphone and startling Quistis out of her walk down (unhappy) memory lane. It was permissible for her to tune out like this only because just now she was mechanically taking measurements of the top of the pit, the width of the stairs, and any strange markings they came across: a job that required very limited brainpower. Cid said the pit wouldn't disappear until sundown, so it wasn't even like she had to hurry.

Zell was assigned to photos and communication with their Garden contact. It was a task no harder than the one Quistis had, but apparently it gave him pause. He said, "Do you think Xu knows what she's doing, giving us this kid as our contact?" He showed her the name on his phone – it came up automatically, with all relevant data attached, per the new Garden network. Nida. Huh.

"Zell, it's Nida," she pointed out.

"…who?" Zell said.

Okay. She knew GF memory loss could be bad. But this was ridiculous. "You graduated with him," Quistis said. "And I know for a fact that you two were in my class together. I partnered you for the project on field tactics once!"

"…you mean the kid that flies the Garden?" Zell said. He said this the way young children often said, 'You mean that boy who picks his nose and eats paper?' Which was rich, coming from Zell Dincht. He'd once been the kid who picked his nose and ate paper.

"If Xu assigned him to us, then he's the one for the job," Quistis said.

"He keeps geekin' out on me, though," Zell complained. "I love history. You know I love history. But, like, useful stuff. Stuff that shows you people you might have known, people your grandparents' age, all the pieces that had to fall into line for you to exist. Not dead languages and weird ancient cults and human sacrifice and sorceresses. You know what I know about Ancient Centrans all of a sudden? Everything. That they ate bitter chocolate smeared on tonberry flesh. That they wore loincloths dyed green with cactuar juice. That they thought minimogs were sacred beings of Hyne, but that chocobos were the reincarnations of faithless men cursed by their wives. Notice a pattern here? All this stuff is interesting enough. But I'm on a mission. I don't need interesting. I need useful. And none of this stuff is useful. It's just takin' him a while to get through the translations because they're in super special High Centran, and he thinks this will entertain me."

Yeah, that sounded like Nida.

"I don't actually think he finds many people to talk to about this stuff," Quistis said. "And, to be honest, he's the only person left in Garden who knows any of it. The only other people who ever bothered with Ancient Centran history were…."

She trailed off. Well. Maybe it was better not to mention them. Zell hadn't liked them very much. Quistis believed herself to be careful of the feelings of others, sometimes over-careful, and in particular she tried to be careful when those people were like Zell, and had feelings that ran hot and passionate and often led to their getting picked on by bigger, smarmier people who were quick to point out: _Hey! It's Dincht! We're the Disciplinary Committee and we hear he eats paper._

Or something like that. Quistis had rarely paid attention to the DC – students too big for their cadet uniforms, who swaggered around under Cid's nose, a tight band of friends in spite of the fact that seriously none of them was at all friendly; somehow, mystifyingly, managing to get by with more genuine confidence in their little fingers than Quistis had in her whole body. Rarely paid attention to them except to occasionally give them a dressing down alongside Xu. The only person in Garden who'd hated the Disciplinary Committee more than Zell had been Xu. Though Zell probably had better reason to hate them.

"Who else knows this stuff?" Zell demanded. "Can we call them? Can we call anybody else? I'm bored enough as it is! My brain is bleedin' outta my ears here."

On the other hand, Seifer Almasy and his cronies would make Zell appreciate working with Nida a little bit more, and that could only be for the good.

"Our last experts were the Disciplinary Committee," Quistis said. "Also this one kid in Trabia who's dead now. But mostly the Disciplinary Committee."

Which. That one kid in Trabia was, randomly, probably dead because of the Disciplinary Committee. Because Seifer Almasy, while appearing to be just a run of the mill jerkass around campus for most of his early life, had, roughly seven months ago, mutated into a (brainwashed? Willing?)_murderous_ jerkass, who'd happily complied with the sorceress Ultimecia-disguised-as-Edea's killstrike on Trabia Garden.

Zell wasn't a fan of the brainwashing theory. He held Seifer accountable for every death at Trabia Garden. It was easy to see this. It was written on Zell's face. The moment she mentioned the Disciplinary Committee he took on a horrified expression, kind of like the look one might get if for the first time in their life someone else was explaining what brutal serial murders were, or outlining in detail the mass killings of very small children.

Zell did not like Seifer Almasy, or his little lackeys on the Disciplinary Committee.

"'Course," he said grimly, crouching down and punching the ground with one hand, and with the other holding his vidphone so tightly that Quistis worried it was going to crack. "'Course our resident sociopath was into creepy, creepy ancient history."

"I don't think sociopathy and an interest in history are actually at all connected," Quistis said mildly. "Do you want me to take your phone?"

Zell didn't seem to hear her. "Do you think he was, like, into it because of Hyne and the sorceresses bein' from Centra and stuff? Do you think he just had this weird obsession his whole life? I mean, he was always an asshole—"

"He was….messed up," Quistis said. "He was never adopted, you know. And just. He could be really awful if he didn't like you."

"You don't have to tell me that," Zell said. "He and Fujin and Raijin treated me like dirt!"

To punctuate this, he hit the dirt again. It sent up a big dust cloud, and they both fell to coughing.

"Sorry," Zell said, immediately contrite. "Sorry, sorry."

Quistis waved him off. She said, "You know, I never got why Fujin and Raijin followed him like they did. Or why Cid let him get away with so much."

Cid had, in his own weird way, adored Seifer Almasy. When other students fell to bullying new recruits just because they had silly hair and came from Balamb town, Cid gave them work duty in the garage. But to Seifer Almasy he'd given command of the DC, to "teach him responsibility." When other students failed their field exams, they were gently recommended for positions in private security somewhere, or offered internships in Timber with people Cid knew. But Seifer Almasy was given monitored detention and a talking to and reminded that Garden was his home, and allowed to try again, as needed. When other students carved up their sparring partners, Cid had them psychologically evaluated and put on probation. When Seifer Almasy did it, he got automatic therapy with Dr. K, no eval necessary, and a band-aid with a picture of a T-Rexaur on it.

Seifer had always cut an infamous figure in Garden, always had a bad name. Mostly it was because of his own bad attitude. But it was also because he'd always existed on some unfair higher plane, where nothing could make him drop in Cid's estimation and he never had to face the consequences of his actions.

"Fujin and Raijin were probably as messed up as he was," Zell said, so viciously he almost didn't sound like the nice Zell she knew. "And Cid? Screw Cid. You know he's hiding stuff from us on this, right?"

"Something more than the fact that we're probably going to be stealing a copy of the Crystal Pillar from Esthar?" Quistis said. Because Cid had come clean about that.

"I—I dunno," Zell said. "He just seems…off. I can feel it in my gut. That's why me and Squall are stealing his water."

Quistis blinked at him. 'Gut' was not a very good reason to mistrust a client. Particularly when the client was Cid. All their gut feelings were muddled when it came to Cid. And that was a little childish. The water thing. Sure, she was a Blue Mage, and could hold off all day out here with very little water. But Zell and Squall did have water of their own. She'd assumed they'd been draining Cid's stores because they were genuinely thirsty, not because they were acting like three-year-olds.

Possibly Squall wasn't. Possibly it was just Zell. Squall was actually very mature for his age.

At this point Squall came over. He'd gone back to the orphanage to rendezvous with their contact from Esthar, the one who would be analyzing the stair shard and comparing it to the Crystal Pillar. Now he showed up with more of Cid's canteens in tow and offered some to each of them.

"I know we have our own," Squall said, shrugging. "But we're using his stuff. Since I think he's hiding something."

Well. Scratch that last bit about maturity.

"That's what I think!" Zell said. "Something just feels off, you know?"

"He had a lot of books on Ancient Centrans in his house," said Squall. "I think he tried to clean them up before I got there. But he just put them in his bedroom. Which smelled like blood. You know. Metallic."

Wow, creepy. The blood thing. And also the fact that Squall had been poking around Cid's bedroom. Zell and Quistis stared at him.

"He didn't say I couldn't check out every room in the house," Squall said, like this wasn't ridiculous. Then, after a minute in which it seemed like he was deliberating something, he added, "I called Xu while I was up there. She said Rinoa was on a mission."

"Rinoa? Rinoa's not even a SeeD," said Zell.

"I know," Squall said slowly. "That's why it seemed weird. Xu said she'd told her she sensed magic use in Deling City, which violates the ceasefire. So she sent her out with Irvine and Selphie to pinpoint it. But I just… I worry that Rinoa's powers…. They scare her. So she doesn't tell me these things right away. She didn't, I mean. At the time she sensed the magic. Even though I was right there with her."

Quistis thought maybe Squall was trying to share some of his romantic woes with them, some moment in which he and Rinoa had not quite connected properly. She tried to express the appropriate amount of friendly sympathy. She said, "I'm sorry that happened to you, Squall."

Squall blinked at her. "It didn't happen to me. It happened to Rinoa. It didn't affect me much at all," he said. Then he clarified: "I'm telling you this because it's why I was looking through Cid's house. I wanted to find Edea's contact information. If anyone can talk to Rinoa about being a sorceress, it's Edea."

"That's a lot less skeevy than you just peeking into Cid's bedroom to sniff out blood," Zell told him.

Squall rolled his eyes. "It's going to be night soon," he told them. "Let's head back. I've set up cameras around the crater to record the closing sinkhole. They'll send the feed straight to Garden. Let's just get some rest tonight, in case our Esthar contact gets back to us and we have to head down into this thing tomorrow."

That seemed like sound reasoning. And Quistis and Zell were bored out of their minds at this point, so they welcomed it. They packed up their equipment. Quistis prepared herself to scale the side of the crater, but Squall said, "Oh, and there are stairs. Cid sucks," so thankfully, that wasn't something she had to endure twice. They sped back to the orphanage, set up camp again, started to analyze the day's results, ate from their stores (Quistis refused to let the boys steal Cid's food as well as his water), and – to cap off the most uneventful mission of all time – went to bed.

Quistis fell asleep first, she thought. Zell's mind was always buzzing, and it took a while for him to get to sleep. And Squall seemed like the type to lay awake and think about things a lot. So she was pretty sure her eyes were the first to close.

They were also the first to open. Because her fellow SeeDs were screaming. They were fast asleep. Knocked out completely. Definitely not with her, in the waking world.

But screaming. Just screaming and screaming and screaming.


	9. Chapter 9

"They're going to tell you your sister is dead," Renata told Raijin. "Don't believe them. And they're going to want you back in interrogation as soon as they think you're back in here—" here she tapped the side of his head. His mind. "Permanently."

Raijin couldn't suppress a shudder. It ripped through his body, made his ribs hurt more.

It wasn't the torture. SeeD cadets learned to withstand torture. No, it was the false sense of camaraderie from his torturer. It was the false friendliness. Raijin had friends, and they weren't the best friends in the world by any means. They sometimes kicked him. Or tried to conquer the world on behalf of Galbadia and the sorceress Edea, and fucked up his life in the process. But Raijin stayed by them because they were his friends, and friendship meant something to him.

And the perversion of friendship, the pats on the arm, the fake smiles from the man in red - that meant something too, even if he didn't know what it was, and only knew that it was painful.

Renata stood and crossed to the door, checking that no one was listening. She locked it. Then she came back, and thrust something at him. Raijin couldn't really take it; his wrists were bound. So she held it up where he could see it. Some clear liquid in a vial.

"Here's the stuff they used on you," she said. "Analythymios. A sorceress' brew. Takes you right out of your head, the way a real Ripper might. I could only get this one vial. If they drop in unexpected, and you don't feel ready, I think I could trick Farica into thinking it's water. Ask her to give it to you. Then they'll think you're not recovered. It'll buy you some time. But don't use it right away! Use it when we need it. See, I have this plan—"

Someone pounded on the door.

"Farica!" came a familiar voice. An easy, confident, commanding voice.

The man in red.

"It's him," said Renata, her face going tight with fear.

"Give it to me," Raijin begged.

"No!" Renata said. "If I give it to you now, then—"

"_Give it to me_."

She had a heart. She gave it to him.

* * *

That same night, Selphie finally made it back into central Deling City. It took until nighttime because getting into the city undetected involved extremely surreptitious train travel, which was hard in the current political climate. And so, when she arrived, she found the library doors closed. Opening hours were over. She considered breaking in to find Rinoa, but decided against it. Rinoa was probably back in her father's house by now.

And actually Selphie relished the thought of breaking into Caraway's place instead. Since Caraway had thrown her boyfriend in prison and all.

Selphie's memory wasn't the greatest. For obvious reasons. But the last time she'd met the general, she was fairly sure he hadn't been as domineering, as hard-edged, as dangerous as he'd been in the club, or even earlier in the day with his daughter. He was a terrible person; that went without saying. One of the main forces behind Galbadian supremacy, the kind of guy who was good face-to-face, who loved his kid and maybe his friends and possibly his mother and dog, but who could orchestrate serious damage if you let him. He was no doubt on a secret Xu blacklist of SeeD's most watched and least trusted.

But he did love his daughter. That much all the group agreed on, even if they never admitted it to Rinoa's face. He was always finding new ways to keep in touch, new excuses to contact Garden to see her. So why the extreme high-handedness? Why the open hostility? Why the nighttime raids, such a flashy and extreme way of handling a potential threat, sure to let the whole city know what he was up to? And wasn't that not his usual way of doing things. Caraway had been a spymaster, like Missy had said. Even now, much of his work was in the shadows. He hired assassins. He didn't make a lot of noise when he shut down his political opponents. And he always covered his tracks so they couldn't be traced back to him.

So why in Hyne's patootie did he think it was acceptable to bust into a public place, kick Selphie's boyfriend when he was down, and then send poor Irvy to prison?

Not that Galbadian prisons were all that indomitable, or even anything new for their group.

Still, it was enough for Selphie to hold a grudge. She considered breaking in through the sewers, but figured Caraway knew they knew about that, and anyway that was how to get in without doing damage, and a little damage was half the fun. So instead she disabled the security system over the back wall, cast status ailments on the guard dogs (poor things didn't deserve it, but then it wasn't permanent, and they were bred to respond phoenix downs well after twenty four hours had passed; and someone was sure to find them by then), disabled the inner lawn security system, disabled the house security system (she'd had some training in disabling things after the whole missiles fiasco; it had only seemed prudent not to rely on luck all the time), opened the back door while the clueless maid stepped down into the cellar, and then, as an afterthought, doubled back around and broke a window for the hell of it.

Selphie had a nice healthy petty revenge streak when it came to assaults on her nearest and dearest.

She went in. The back door opened into the kitchen. Huge, with gleaming appliances that looked classically old-fashioned but were in fact pretty modern to go by their settings. Also very pretty tiled floors and walls, and in the corner a dusty red dog bowl with Angelo's name in curlicue print, and at the large island some plush red spinning stools. Selphie took a whirl. Fun. Rinoa must have had an awesome childhood in this kitchen. Everything was big and clean: the stove, the fridge, the cabinets. Selphie took a peep in each. Pies. Ice cream. Juicy pink ham with pineapple slices. Odd bubbly drinks in pink and red and pale orange bottles. Yum all around. She stole a pie and a bubbly drink and a slice of ham, then she ducked into the hall before the maid could come back.

The house was bigger on the inside than the outside, she thought. Had to be. Her parents' house in Trabia was more of a railroad-style cabin, tiny and cozy and homely in the extreme, with ancient plain wood paneling and lots of bedraggled rugs. But nothing so humble as a rug desecrated Fury Caraway's halls. He was a gleaming parquet and plush carpet man. His paneling was fancy and came with intricate trim. The whole place had a simultaneously cosmopolitan and antique air to it; Selphie thought she could recall Rinoa telling her it had been designed by some guy who'd betrayed Timber to the Galbadians ages ago, some aesthete asshole, and how this made it a national landmark.

There was nothing about the house that really screamed 'Rinoa', though, come to think of it. It was too much. It seemed false. Rinoa was not false.

Rinoa was... complex. She loved pink, and wore what had to be seven coats of mascara. She packed a spare dress and party shoes for use everywhere she went. She had a handbag full of dog treats. She could hold her own in battle, but then most sorceresses could; it wasn't a matter of training or discipline. And actually she resisted training and discipline all the time, as a matter of course, almost. She listened to others because she respected them and because she thought it was important to, naturally. But Selphie had long-ago realized, while watching Rinoa shamelessly mock Squall for the umpteenth time, that Rinoa's natural inclination was… Well. Trolly.

She didn't like to let people get away with their bad attitudes. She wasn't taken in by that. This made sense. She was into doing her own thing, fighting back, resisting. She often did this within a group, yes; she was a team player to the end. But she also had a fiercely autonomous rebel spirit. It was not selfish or anything; she had, after all, been willing to seal herself away to save the world. But it was personal, independent, self-focused. Rinoa looked inward more often than people thought she did, and she reflected. With no small amount of humor, either, since she could tell you ten million heartbreaking stories about Fury Caraway's yoke growing up, but Selphie suspected that Rinoa understood keenly the differences between herself, wealthy and grandiose, and the SeeDs, tough and mundane. So her stories were often watered down, made palatable, smaller and more relatable so that people wouldn't be upset or confused by them.

Rinoa's rebellious nature didn't keep her from caring about people and wanting to understand them, even when those people didn't care much about understanding her.

So. She probably hadn't deserved her friends acting like jerks to her. Selphie felt like a jerk. If she'd had a fancy house with fancy windows, Rinoa would have been well within her rights to smash one or two, as a kind of general chaotic comeuppance.

Selphie went upstairs. From what Caraway had told them earlier, she could deduce that Rinoa's room was probably in the East Wing. And Rinoa had left Angelo here this morning, since Deling City had weird rules about dog walking and she'd figured it would just be less trouble to have the maids care for her alongside the guard dogs. So Angelo would be in Rinoa's room somewhere, probably. Selphie held out a slice of ham.

"Aaaangelo," she called. "Here girl!"

She heard a whine and anxious canine scratching coming from a pair of tall double doors further down the hall. Gotcha. The doors were locked, so Selphie picked the locks. Then she let herself in.

Woah. _Woah_.

Rinoa's room was easily half as big as a B-Garden lecture hall. And pink. Very pink. Two walls of books, a wall of closet doors covered in beautiful art, a wall with huge windows and a huge fireplace, a perfect princess canopy bed in the center, records galore, clothes galore, fancy pink toe shoes hanging from a pretty brass hatstand, tuffets here and there with pink ribbons, a big fancy vanity, a huge bathroom just off the main room, and Julia Heartilly on the wall above the fireplace, looking every inch the singing vamp she'd been long before she married Fury Caraway, coated in furs, with a veiled hat and red lipstick and her daughter's dark eyes boring down into Selphie.

Selphie had, for a minute, the hilarious thought that Squall had probably gotten down and dirty in here, all surrounded by pink cushions and ribbons and his girlfriend's mom staring down at him.

Well, it wasn't like Squall didn't seem a little bit kinky.

Rinoa wasn't back yet. But she would be, because she wouldn't leave Angelo. So Selphie locked the door again, gave Angelo the ham, and settled in to wait.

She hoped Irvy was doing alright.

He couldn't be doing too badly. His father worked at the D-District. Selphie had only discovered this about two months ago, Irvine not being the most forthcoming soul in the world when it came to his background. She'd told him that maybe it would been relevant information at some point. Irvine said, "Nah, because he hardly ever took me to work or anything. I was always out and about, if you know what I mean."

What he meant was pretty clearly: "I don't want to talk about this, so I will make the vaguest of replies and let your mind go to the gutter. Then we can all pretend this isn't about my unwillingness to discuss my past, but is just another mention of what a ladies' man I am."

Boys.

Selphie had never had a boyfriend this serious before; she'd had a few childish kisses with some Trabia boys, but Trabia boys were different. They were straightforward and boring and not half as handsome or strangely considerate as Irvine. Nor were they half as likely to hide things, leer at other people, or stock up on literally every kind of porn under the sun (as far as she knew). So maybe it was a trade-off.

But still.

She could remember some things, about before. She could remember being impossibly close to him, terribly fond; simply assuming that Irvy was an annex of Selphie, the boy who would be at her side always. She couldn't remember the awful pain of being taken away from him, but her parents said it had happened. They'd adopted her, and she'd been prone to fits of uncharacteristic sadness due to missing the orphanage, and then she'd gone on that camping trip and found that GF and come back good as new, so they'd let it lie. They hadn't reminded her of what she'd lost, hadn't explained to her about being adopted, about crying out for her friends.

They'd thought that was for the best.

She didn't mind, so much. Her parents were good people. They were low-level T-Garden techs who could have made more of themselves if they'd hitched a ride back to their native Esthar, except that as far as they knew the city had disappeared, and also they'd had no idea what had become of Adel (they'd fled long before Laguna Loire arrived on the scene), and also it benefitted their daughter to have them working at Garden, because then they could watch over her, plus the low low Garden tuition became a flat zero if you worked for Garden. Which was good, because, the refugee settlements of Trabia being depressingly depressed places, a flat zero was about all they'd been able to afford.

They hadn't told her much about Esthar, growing up. At first she'd thought she just couldn't remember them telling her much, but then a quick check-in with them confirmed it; they just hadn't said anything. They'd taught her how to work some basic kinds of Estharian tech, but that was it. People didn't like to talk about Esthar under Adel; it wasn't done, and even now Selphie respected that.

No, instead her parents had taken her camping in the Vienne range. They'd gone ice skating and chocobo-hunting, catching the birds only to let them run free again through the forests. They'd gone to caverns in the mountains hung with beautiful icicles, where frozen lakes gleamed and twinkled like crystal. They'd traveled up to the top of the volcano range, the so-called birthplace of Hyne. They'd gone to town, now and then, via sled or ski, to try cheesecake and other local delicacies; they'd taken her to council meetings with the Shumi and sat her on their knee as they bargained; they three had spent impossibly green summers fishing and swimming, heedless of how cold Trabia's blue waters were even in July. They'd encouraged her to make friends, hosted student gatherings in their tiny cabin, made every birthday a resounding success.

Selphie'd had an exceptionally happy childhood after the orphanage.

Irvy, she was beginning to think, hadn't, so much.

Which made sense. Everybody in Trabia who'd been to Galbadia said it was the exact opposite of home – smog and vice and extreme wealth thrown up next to extreme poverty (which actually just sounded exciting, since in Trabia all they had was the poverty). Galbadia, people said, was twisted and horrible, as twisted and horrible as beautiful Esthar had become under Adel.

But Selphie had found that, aside from the part where the Galbadians had bombed her home, she liked this twisted continent. She'd liked traveling from Timber to Deling City to quaint Winhill. She liked the different kinds of faces, the snatches of old and long-suppressed languages. It was her old T-Garden social science textbooks come to life, everywhere something new and diverse, all kinds of vibrant places, even if they were tinged by war and conquering and Galbadian invasion.

And she found that Irvy, once she'd rediscovered him, had all the hallmarks of this vibrant living on him. He wasn't inherently intellectual– that was to say, not an exceptionally academic person or a bookworm at all, just someone who'd had to become smart to keep up with Garden life – but he knew more about different kinds of places and people than he'd let on, had danced the night away with some bright, spangly new person nearly every night of his adolescence, had stunning recall for tales of cowboys and dames and adventurers and spies and national personalities. He was a city creature, as cosmopolitan as Rinoa, even if she knew the elite libraries and theaters and he knew the backstreets and bars.

He was interesting, all of a sudden. Not just little Selphie's shadow. Now someone who'd lived, who'd seen gambling dens and dance halls, who had secrets he didn't want to reveal. It was funny, because he thought it was his charm and ease that attracted her to him. But that wasn't it at all. She liked him even when he was tightly-wound over something that reminded him of the unfair situation back home, when he reacted without thinking to news about Deling City politics, when he dropped his façade to blather on about something socio-cultural and important to him.

He was very far away from the boy she'd known in those moments. Very far away from her. But he became, suddenly, someone she wanted to learn about, to connect with. Someone who could offer her more than other people could; not just a comfortable, beloved old friend, though he was and would always be that. But also a whole new being, a complement to her, not simply a compatriot.

She really, really liked him.

It was balls that other people didn't see him the same way she did, and thought they could just chuck him in prisons or sell him out to the media or refer to him in unflattering terms. Selphie could have beaten them all up, except that even as a SeeD you had to get orders that liberally permitted that kind of thing, and anyway, it wasn't like she could identify or hunt down everybody who gave Irvine a hard time.

But still. She was protective of the things she loved. Trabia. Irvine. Her friends.

Angelo whined and shoved her nose in Selphie's lap, begging for some pie. Selphie took a swig of her orange fizzy and scratched behind the dog's ears.

"Yeah," she said. "You've gotta stand by what's yours, right, Angelo?"

But Angelo wasn't just looking for pie. She was warning Selphie. The tap tap of multiple pairs of shoes came down the hall, and then there was a hand on Rinoa's doorknob, and muffled cursing when it proved to be locked. Selphie stood noiselessly and gathered up her food and drink, then went into the bathroom and locked that door. Angelo followed her but did not go in. Through the keyhole, Selphie could see the dog lying down in front of the door, as if to bar the way for whoever was coming in.

It was Caraway and the maid. The maid moved in like she was scared to enter the room. Caraway moved in like he was looking for something.

"I already clean here as requested, twice a week—" the maid complained.

"Ordered," Caraway said shortly. "You mean ordered. It is not a request. She is my daughter."

"She's put up magic books," the maid said, accusatory, "On the shelves."

"Where else would she put them? In the bathtub? And they're not the really useful ones," said Caraway. "Those she would have taken back to Garden with her." He spat 'Garden' out like a curse. But then his face – or what Selphie could see of it – softened. "She read banned Timberi propaganda once, too. And when I took that away, she went straight to the source."

He gave a low chuckle, but it sounded more forced than anything.

"I think the girl is becoming a leader," Caraway said. "I think this should be evident to all."

"She's becoming something," said the maid.

Caraway scowled.

"Now, we need—" he began. Then he caught sight of something on the dresser. "Maybe this," he said thoughtfully, picking it up. From her vantage point behind the keyhole, Selphie couldn't make it out. He pocketed it. "And something significant as well," he added cryptically. "Though it puzzles me more and more to guess what she cares about. Julia's portrait. And the dog, of course—"

Here Angelo gave a whine, as if she knew they were talking about her.

"—but both of those would be missed," said Caraway.

He strode to the closets and pulled the doors open on one. Clothes and tennis rackets, hockey sticks and shoes, hats and boxes upon boxes of papers and letters, scarves, more records, umbrellas and lace parasols, handbags and fans and fancy monogrammed suitcases.

"She doesn't care about any of this," Caraway said resignedly.

"That's right," came a cold voice from the doorway. "I don't."

Rinoa. She looked much the same as she had this morning, except she was carrying a red book and her scarf disguise had come out of her hair at some point. She'd tied it around her neck a little carelessly. Also, her sunglasses were pushed up on her head. It gave her the air of a pissed-off tourist, someone visiting foreign lands and expecting to find wonders, only to be surprised by moth-eaten bedsheets and cold fish for breakfast. Selphie knew that look; visitors to Trabia tended to look like that.

"Get out," Rinoa said shortly. "You could at least wait until I'm not in town to claim all my stuff as yours."

The maid, taking note of her tone, squeaked a little. Caraway gave her an annoyed look. Then he held out his hands. "It is mine," he said. "But what's mine is yours."

Then he walked out. His daughter looked after him in disgust, rolling her eyes as the maid tried to squeeze past without touching her. Rinoa locked the door after them, then did something very strange. She backed against the door, breathing hard, like that encounter with her father had taken a lot out of her. Angelo got up and went to her, whining. Rinoa seemed not to notice. Then she slid down to the floor, looking for all the world more distressed than Selphie had ever seen her.

And Selphie had seen her at some very low points in their lives.

Selphie wrenched open the bathroom door, ran into the room, and said, "Rinoa! What's wrong?"

Of course, in her worry over her friend, she'd forgotten that Rinoa didn't know she was there. Rinoa gave a small surprised scream to find her in the room.

"Selphie?" she said. "Where's Irvine?" Her voice was very low and urgent, once she'd calmed down a bit.

"Your dad sent him to prison," Selphie said. She sat next to Rinoa on the floor, pulling a distressed Angelo into her lap to soothe the dog, and relayed the events of the evening. Rinoa, already looking dark, became more and more visibly angry as the story went on.

"I need Irvine most of all," she complained, burying her head in her hands.

Okay. That made no sense. Not that Irvy wasn't a good SeeD – he was. But the idea that there was some SeeD service Rinoa could get from him that she couldn't from Selphie was weird. Irvy was great and Selphie adored him. But between them, she was higher ranked. He hadn't even bothered to pass the SeeD test. There was nothing he knew that Selphie didn't.

Only. There was. Irvy was a former G-Garden cadet. And, for all that their initial story to Caraway had been a lie, from what they'd seen of Missy and Tulip, G-Garden was involved in this somehow. So maybe-

"Did you find something?" Selphie said excitedly. "About the illegal GF use?"

Rinoa stared at her. Rinoa staring at someone should not have been an uncomfortable experience. Rinoa was very pretty – she had fair skin like the old Dolletians, dark hair like the noblest of the Galbadian desert folk, dark Timber eyes – she looked like a doll, really. She had the kind of face you didn't like to look away from, because it was attractive and comforting all at once. Lovely. Not _too_ lovely, not unnervingly lovely, not perfectly lovely, not world-destroyingly lovely, not like Edea or Ultimecia had been. Just nice.

But now there was something strange around her eyes, some odd, faraway, angry aspect, like she could see things Selphie couldn't, and like those things made her furious.

"The GF," Rinoa said tightly. "Yes. Well. I can't tell you here. We have to go. I'll tell you on the train. Or, well. No. I'll tell you at Garden."

"…at Garden?" Selphie asked uneasily. She reached out a hand to steady Rinoa, who was looking like she might start swaying a bit.

"Don't touch me," Rinoa snapped. "You can't touch me right now."

And the weird thing was, she didn't say it in Principle, the standard language everybody from Esthar to Galbadia spoke, even if sometimes the accents shifted a bit across oceans and borders. She said it in her other language. Her special language, the one no one spoke, but that she could make you understand if she felt like it.

So it came out like: You _kan't_ touch me right now.

Selphie, unpleasant experience with Ultimecia aside, didn't mind the whole hard k thing. She thought it was kind of funny, usually. But right now, for some reason, it felt really creepy.

* * *

Squall was dreaming.

Squall rarely dreamed. Or maybe he just didn't remember his dreams. He thought it was a GF thing: that they snatched up dreams like they did memories, maybe. It didn't much matter either way. The last time he'd dreamt, he'd been a moron. It had been Ellone's fault. His adoptive sister: she'd wanted to change the past, and also possibly introduce to Squall to the riveting reality that his father was alive, successful, in Esthar, and didn't have two brain cells to rub together.

Thanks, Ellone.

This had been his first thought, when he'd fallen asleep in Centra and opened his eyes to discover that he was someplace else completely, and also some_one_ else. Thanks, Ellone. Thanks so very much.

He didn't hate Ellone. Far from it. One of the first things he'd remembered, once he'd realized he'd been forgetting things at all, was how much he'd loved Ellone. How much Ellone had loved him. But, love notwithstanding; she still thought it was fun to send him crashing through time and space to fill roles he'd never wanted to fill. She'd once made him live his dreams as Laguna Loire, leg-cramping sorceress-defeater and official Leonhart family sperm donor. And now she was doing it again, he thought. Because when his head hit the pillow, he became someone else.

Someone familiar.

He knew those hands. Long fingers, criss-crossed with scars from the earliest days of training. No, maybe not. These were more banged up than he remembered. Too scarred. But he thought he knew those muscled forearms, too. Even if now they were more ropey than muscled, skinnier than before. Still, he recognized that small, pale birthmark just underneath the knobbly bone on the right wrist. He'd seen it many times, as he'd caught sight of that hand adjusting its grip on the blade.

That blade. He knew that blade.

It had been a gift from Cid. Like his own. But his own had been upgraded countless times during the war and the past seven months. While Hyperion remained, essentially, the same blade that had sliced open Squall's forehead all those months ago.

Seifer.

He was _Seifer_.

The scars and the blade were only the first clues. Squall would have known Seifer anywhere even without all that. People thought Seifer and Squall were inherently different. They were not. They never had been. They had never been opposites, only inversions of each other. They'd once had the same streak of powerful stubbornness, the same determinedly standoffish independence, the same dismissive attitude towards their fellow men. Only Squall had grown beyond that, had changed and matured. And Seifer had…not. He remained a stubborn, easily-manipulated child; he'd become not wiser, but more selfish, more vicious, more monstrous. He was Squall fourteen months ago, gone wrong instead of right. Horribly, horribly distorted. The vision of what Squall himself might have become; the essential material of a lost, abandoned young man all there waiting for development, but he hadn't developed with a firm Cid Kramer thrust into the heroic spotlight. Instead, he'd been twisted into a tool, something pitiful.

And even if they hadn't been so similar at heart, hadn't had the same starting point merely to arrive at different conclusions – Squall still would have known Seifer under any circumstances. Because Seifer had always been one of the only constants in his life; even if Squall hadn't always realized it. Seifer had always been there. Always. Frequently mouthing off about the very things in life that annoyed Squall. Frequently mouthing off in ways that annoyed Squall. But still there. Loud, and bright, and familiar: an uncomfortable habit and a habitual comfort, because he'd never left, had simply gone with Squall from the orphanage to Cid's care to proper classes to SeeD training. Squall had tolerated and even liked him, in his own way; he'd never paid Seifer as much attention as Seifer maybe would have liked, but it wouldn't have occurred to him to. A nod here, a silent agreement there, a regular brush-off, all this had been the sum of what Squall had to offer Seifer. And he'd really thought that that was all Seifer wanted from him, anyway.

But Seifer's 'death' had jolted Squall, had made him feel queasy and horrible for the first time in his memory. It had been like losing a part of himself, some constant but oft-noticed body part, an unruly limb, or a blood vessel or something, the part of Squall that had always been there and had always kept him pumped, on his toes. Seifer's death told Squall that he, too, could die. He himself could vanish, if it were possible for the world to remove someone as ever-present, as familiar as Seifer. As recognizable.

So that was the who. The alterna-knight. The lapdog knight. The orphanage gang's own resident troublesome mystery.

The one person missing in Squall's life right now. Weird as that was to admit about Seifer.

The how was, as established, probably Ellone.

But _when_ was he, exactly? He had no idea. Sometime in the past seven months, probably, going by the scars. And why was he here? He had even less idea. He'd spoken earlier with Ellone while calling into Esthar; she hadn't mentioned that she'd be dropping by to torment his sleep again. Although at least now she was waiting for him to go to sleep naturally, instead of booting him into unannounced and unconsented-to magic father/son bonding naptime.

But this wasn't his father. This was Seifer.

And Squall had no idea _where_ Seifer was. It looked completely unlike any place he'd ever been. And he'd been, at this point, all over every square corner of the earth. He'd even been in cells before. That had been courtesy of Seifer, actually.

Just not in cells like this.

In a way, it reminded him of Ultimecia's castle. Old. The bars were twisted works of art, like someone's idea of a sick joke, iron bent into a kind of crowded cityscape, with small people scurrying to and fro, grimaces carved into their faces, and strange creatures, gargoyles pulling carriages. A beautiful vista, intricate and impenetrable.

The interior of the cell, too, was beautiful. No shackles and no electric torture for Seifer. He had gleaming metal floors, stone walls with more grimacing figures carved into them, a low table piled with books, a toilet behind a jade-green metallic screen rising from the floor like an exotic grove of jewels, and even a proper bed, a canopy with green hangings, so pristine and perfect that it reminded Squall of Rinoa's princess canopy back in Deling City.

There was a symbol on the hangings that was also familiar. It looked a little like the Garden emblems. But it wasn't that. It was off, somehow.

He didn't have time to examine it. Seifer wasn't looking in that direction. Instead, he was furiously swinging his gunblade, going through paces, as much a caged beast here as he'd been back at Balamb, when stone walls and iron bars hadn't been his jailers, but rules and restrictions.

Why had someone jailed him? Or. No. That was dumb. There were a million reasons to jail Seifer at this point. Why had someone jailed him and not told Squall about it?

Squall felt fury spike through him.

Seifer was – well. He didn't know how to explain it. His. Cid's. Theirs. Garden's. Squall had assumed he'd find his way back to Garden eventually—oh, not by crawling back, like Zell seemed to think he would; not out of desperation, as Quisis had once suggested he might; not willingly, really, since Squall couldn't imagine Seifer ever showing up anywhere with his tail between his legs. No. But still. Squall had been sure that Seifer would be back. Squall had assumed that Fate or Cid would handle it, like Fate and Cid handled everything else. Seifer was meant to be at Garden. He was a part of the fabric of the place, like the hot dogs and the detentions and the rank smell near the Training Center exit. He'd betrayed the place, yes. He was owed payback for that. But that was just it. It was Garden, above any other place, that owed him payback. It was Garden, more than trampled Galbadia and destroyed Esthar, that ought to have the power to deal with Seifer.

Garden had always been Seifer's home, after all. Garden had made him. Seifer Almasy was Garden gone wrong, and therefore it was Garden's business to set him right.

And Squall did mean to set him right. Not kill him. There was a reason Cid had always given Seifer chance after chance: Seifer had strength, and talent, and promise. Yes, he was reckless and arrogant and his personality was downright awful. But Squall knew better than anyone that you could be a real piece of crap and still put some good into the world. And Seifer owed it to the world to do just that, now. He owed it to Galbadia, to Esthar, to Rinoa.

And to his fellow Garden residents, the people he'd turned against.

The papers assumed that Squall plotted furious vengeance against Seifer every night. He didn't. He never had. He wasn't cruel. He didn't want to kill Seifer. He didn't think that would fix anything, and anyway, he didn't know for sure that Seifer had been totally in control. He'd been turned inside out by Ultimecia. He'd been nothing but wild-eyed, haunted, and crazy at the end. Squall was not inhuman; he understood that, while what Seifer had done was undeniably wrong, the truth was a complex thing,

Squall wouldn't kill him. Squall would throw a SeeD uniform on him; he had no problem with that; Irvine was a SeeD, so it wasn't like passing the test mattered for anything nowadays. And then after that? Squall thought maybe Seifer might like to try his hand at cleaning up some Lunar Cry monsters, dealing with the Galbadians, speaking to the press in Rinoa's defense, getting his penance plastered all over the papers, his picture on every newsstand, handling frantic calls from the Estharians, paying court to Xu in her worst moods.

Alright. Maybe Squall was a little cruel and inhumane.

It probably said something about him that the worst punishment he could come up with was exactly what Fate and Cid had tossed on _him_. Only in his case it was supposed to be some kind of reward.

But either way he would have used Seifer. Squall wondered if maybe people didn't know that. If this was why the people who were holding Seifer were keeping it from him and Garden. They thought he'd put Seifer in a cell. They clearly didn't want that for Seifer themselves. This wasn't the D-District, this wasn't some fetid hole where Galbadian political prisoners came to die, this wasn't the blank white laboratory pens of Esthar, this wasn't even a Garden detention room. It was more like a luxury suite, and only the livid buzz of Seifer's thoughts, the mental acknowledgement Seifer gave himself, angry and disappointed, confirming that he'd been captured, told Squall that this was not, in fact, just a really weird room with fancy decorative ironwork.

Since the world thought Squall Leonhart hated Seifer Almasy (as much as Seifer hated him? Squall really did not know; oddly enough, he suspected Seifer didn't hate him and never really had), the world assumed that Squall would want to see him mistreated. So now that he wasn't being mistreated, just brought to heel like a crated dog, no one thought to alert Squall. Possibly visions of horrifying headlines danced in people's heads: **Garden Commander Beheads Rival; Leonheartless Reveals Inner Savagery!**

Squall told himself that he did not care very much about what the papers said. He wasn't Rinoa; he did not have the kind of sweet temperament and sassy delivery that could defend itself should it be criticized for collecting gossip rags. And anyway that was pointless masochism. But still. The very thought that someone else might even contemplate such a headline made him gloomy.

As if to punctuate this, Seifer gave a growl and massacred the air in a vicious fashion.

It was a surprisingly good thrust on his part. Seifer had never used his reach properly, preferring to rely on flashy chi attacks like a cheat, and privately Squall had seen it as a shame. Seifer had a powerful, long-limbed body; if he'd ever bothered to actually think for two seconds, instead of just jumping straight into raw power and displays of pointless heroism, he would have roundly bested Squall during training. As it was, he'd mostly seemed to fall into using his whole body every once in a while, out of sheer dumb luck or brainless instinct, and so he'd lost as often as he'd won.

Seifer had no one to beat him now. In short time he became bored. He set Hyperion down with care on the table then retreated to the bed. He put his head in his hands, panting hard, as he'd been working himself pretty intently.

His mind was very carefully blank the whole time, which was odd. It wasn't that Seifer wasn't thinking. The odd, furious, impulsive curse came to the forefront every now and then. But, for the most part, his thoughts were very very boring. He was thinking of his exercises. Then Quistis's worst and most pointless lectures, recited rote from the textbook, the kind of teaching only Quistis could get away with without inciting mass disrespect from the student body. Then the steps for escaping from a Ruby Dragon in the training center, basic training manual II. He was, Squall realized, trying to calm himself. His thoughts were military, precise, almost meditative. Because beneath the surface he was furious, but someone had thrown him in a cell (turnabout was fair play, Squall supposed), and rendered him powerless, and even Seifer Almasy, forever a furious little boy at heart, had enough sense to realize that anger was going to get him nowhere in this scenario.

Then something odd happened. An image flashed in Seifer's head. People. All arrayed in a strange formation, like minor officers in the army, assembled to mount an attack. But not the Galbadians. Not blue armor and guns. Not basic incompetence roped into order and set on Vinzer Deling's enemies.

No. It was a more ragtag bunch than that. Strange weapons. Grim faces. Odd costumes. Old-fashioned.

But familiar, somehow. Which was weird, because Squall was very sure he'd never seen this group before. Maybe the familiarity came from Seifer?

It had to. It did. The vision, or memory, whatever it was, launched Seifer down a completely different path. Heroic sagas. He knew every single one, from the most overlooked knights to the most notorious, which Squall supposed was unsurprising. He picked the knights out of this mental formation. Iseult Neve, Knight to Balamb sorceress Illyria, a fine-boned woman in blue, in the back. Died to see her sorceress safely away from the machinations of the Centrans. Her sworn enemy, Ignotus Romulus, Knight to Firion, who was burnt alive by rebel tribes in Esthar. Daemon Carteret, Knight to Domitia, who'd fallen in battle against the Timberi.

And on and on and on. Naming the knights in his fantasy army.

Was this another calming mechanism? People generally got put in cells to teach them regret, not to spur a renewed love of old children's stories. But then Seifer was a stranger to regret, and an eternal child besides. So jailing him was never going to have the desired effect. Whoever his jailers were, they clearly didn't understand him very well, not half as well as Squall did. Squall felt, oddly enough, slightly pleased by that. And beyond this he felt pleased that Seifer felt no regret.

Regret was completely unlike Seifer. If Seifer had felt regret, it would have been disappointing. Seifer was, after all, as thoroughly stubborn as Squall was. He saw things through to the end; he felt little sorrow or guilt over his actions. He wasn't programmed that way. He never had been. And it didn't help that Squall and Seifer both had been raised the Cid Kramer way: the moral relativist way. There was no 'right' or 'wrong.' There was only your side, and somebody else's. Only a side that paid you, and a side that didn't.

Only. Only what Seifer had done was wrong. Somewhere along the way, Squall had come to a slow, careful, thoughtful acceptance that it was so. Seifer had betrayed his Garden, fucked over his friends, attacked and attempted to harm Rinoa, who had only ever had faith in him… It was wrong. He'd picked the wrong side. The bad side. There _was_ a bad side; that was a thing that could exist, Cid's moral relativism notwithstanding. And that bad side? Had been Seifer's side.

So why was Squall relieved to find that Seifer felt no regret over it? It didn't make sense.

Only it did. Squall could understand why Seifer had gone bad. Sort of. They'd both been raised to ignore right and wrong, and to pursue their goals at the cost of nearly everything else. Kramer-style. Common sense said Seifer was long-overdue some regret, because his goals had cost lives across Balamb, Trabia, and Esthar; and because, in the end, his goals had been evil. Common sense said that Seifer feeling regret would be a good thing. That maybe, Seifer needed to learn, as Squall had, that that there were limits to Cid Kramer's moral relativism.

Only, for Squall, those limits were hazy things. He was still trying to define them. Rinoa helped him out as best she could. Her limits were mighty fortress walls; within, the Good: Timber, their friends, human liberty, compassion, dignity for all. Without the fortress walls? Caraway, Galbadian despotism, animal abuse: all that which Rinoa felt, deep in her heart of hearts, was truly Evil. But Squall was not up to constructing ethical fortresses. Even his love for Rinoa, the best thing in his life so far, was something that he understood might take him to very dark places.

The papers said she might turn into Ultimecia. Unlikely, Squall thought. But then he didn't think about it much, because who cared if she did? She'd been more patient with him than he deserved, yet tough enough with him that he counted himself lucky. She'd stayed with him every step of the way even though she hadn't had to; Ultimecia was SeeD's business, not hers. She'd rescued him from Time Compression. And he simply liked her. She was pretty, funny, brave, clever, and kind.

There was really very little he wouldn't do for her. If she became Ultimecia, then he, like Seifer, would be Ultimecia's knight. Wrong. Evil. But there you had it; Squall knew he was capable of that kind of thing.

Which made it hard to build up a very firm sense of right or wrong. To name his limits. It was almost with relief that he realized that he wasn't alone in being slightly immoral. Seifer Almasy was twice as immoral as he was; he'd served Ultimecia, and felt no regret over it whatsover. He certainly did not demarcate good and bad; he saw no limits; he was not thinking on the evils he had wrought in any way.

He was thinking of the ancient Knights. That was all.

_Kazamai Sprite, Knight to Zigane. Killed by the Nah. Jana Ki, Knight to Eeya, hung by the Ancient Dolletians._

Oh. Death. He was thinking of the deaths of Knights.

Seifer, in characteristic Seifer fashion, had leapt ahead of Squall in an almost frustrating way, clearly unthinkingly, unaware that he'd even accomplished it. He was not naming Knights. He was naming his limits. He was naming the consequences of his actions, the results of doing evil. Maybe he didn't regret doing wrong because what he'd done was wrong. But he had to have some kind of regret motivating him, or else he wouldn't be punishing himself in this fashion.

It was a self-imposed punishment, this recitation. It had to be. Because of course Knights, particularly failed Knights, jailed Knights, Knights who'd served evil ends and made powerful enemies, did not get happy endings. And someone had stuck Seifer in a cell to teach him just that. And Seifer, who'd always made a big production of never learning anything under Quistis Trepe, had to be internalizing the lesson.

_The brothers Telemachus and Oppius Hillfin, also executed by the Dolletians._

Did Seifer think these people would execute him? Had they executed him? Had Ellone sent Squall back to see the moment of his death?

The thought sent a jolt through Squall. They couldn't kill Seifer. No. Squall had a plan for Seifer. He had a way of making Seifer theirs again: Garden's, the orphanage gang's. Seifer had dues to pay to them, his earliest family, the ones he'd tried to get away from, abandoned, sold out. And no one was going to snatch him up before he paid those dues. No one could. The very idea was inconceivable. Fate and Kramer couldn't allow it. Squall wouldn't allow it.

Squall hoped, suddenly, powerfully, with an intensity of feeling that he rarely allowed himself to acknowledge, that somehow he hadn't allowed it. That somehow, in these past seven months, while he'd been bored out of his mind entertaining Galbadians in Timber, dealing with minor cadet peccadilloes, handling Xu, avoiding Laguna, he hadn't overlooked something crucial. Seifer. Garden's loose end. Squall, tired, overwhelmed, focused on so many bothersome new friends and a new girlfriend, had been in favor of sitting back and letting Fate and Cid Kramer handle Seifer, bring Seifer back to them.

But, fuck, that was a stupid idea.

When did Fate and Cid Kramer ever deliver anything good? All the good things in Squall's life (named: Rinoa, Ellone, Selphie, Zell, Quistis, Irvine) he'd had to work for, to struggle past his own defenses to even acknowledge. While the bad things – the infamy, the reporters, the heavy workload, the horrible crushing responsibility, the sense that now more than ever he had to watch what he said and did – all this had been tossed on him by Fate and Cid, without him really wanting or working for it at all. The bad stuff in life just came at you. You didn't seek it out, not any more than Seifer, bright troublesome spark that he was, more alive that Squall had probably ever given him credit for, would ever seek out death.

_Batibat Kerr, Knight to Adel, _Seifer continued.

He seemed to be struggling to bring up that vision again, that memory of his curious army. A Knight army. Some force Seifer had constructed in his head, whimsical and weird, of all the failed dreams that had ever inspired him. But he didn't get to it. The vision was gone. And all that was left in its place was Seifer's angry spike of confusion.

_Was Kerr there?_

Why it was important to him that he include Kerr, Squall had no idea. Unless Seifer was a weird completionist when it came to collecting dead Knights (it seemed like him, actually; Squall vaguely recalled an obsessive neatness about his rival, a need to have everything and everything in its proper place, that had sometimes bordered on the psychotic), and wanted to count every single one in his gallery of Doomed Evildoers.

Kerr was certainly one you wanted to have. Squall had only the vaguest recollection of his history lessons on the woman. GFs and Instructor Trepe's own bored distaste for the subject meant that he'd internalized only those facts necessary to take the test, and then very happily lost all that knowledge as soon as he'd received a passing grade. But he did know that Kerr had been the agent of some of Adel's worst cruelties, just as Seifer had been Ultimecia's. Besides this, Kerr had been the most recent Knight before himself and Seifer. There were still people who remembered her. Probably. Maybe. If she hadn't killed them.

_What happened to Kerr?_

Squall, of course, did not know, and couldn't have told Seifer if he had known. But he could see why it was relevant. If the consequences of his actions had finally come to Seifer's doorstep, then it might be useful to know what the consequences had been for the other most infamous Knight in recent world history.

_People said she had weird powers. Wasn't just a fighter. Was almost as destructive as a sorceress herself. She was responsible for the annihilation of the upper class, the deaths of the scientists who happened to dissent, and for the routing of the plainsmen_, Seifer recited, not without disapproval. The disapproval was slightly hypocritical, given what Seifer himself was responsible for.

For his part, though, Squall put Seifer's crimes aside for the moment and focused on Kerr. He vaguely recalled something about her committing tribal massacres. The Routing of the Plainsmen was probably that. Only more poetically put. Quistis had been in the habit of listing history without any poetry whatsoever, just names and dates and very large death tolls. Trust Seifer, dreamer that he was, to put a grandiose kind of spin on it.

_She had more finesse that her sorceress. Adel cared nothin' for the law, ran Esthar on impulse. Kerr liked law. Law could do what she needed done. Make it impossible for enemies to escape the city. Keep 'em from jobs, keep their kids from attending schools. Deling under a different name, she was. Political. Then she disappeared. People say Adel got rid of her._

'Killed by his own sorceress' didn't seem a likely end for Seifer. Given that Squall and company had put an end to Seifer's sorceress before she could rip apart Seifer's mind any more than she already had. So Squall had to wonder why Seifer was dwelling on it.

_But what if she just….got away?_

Oh.

It made more sense now. Hope. Kerr represented foolish hope. Kerr, who'd brought death to doorsteps across the Estharian continent, meant something very different to Seifer. Go figure. Seifer was contrary like that, stupid like that. He'd lost the war, laid waste to two of the most powerful empires on the planet, attacked Garden, and was sitting in a cell. And yet he still thought of ways to escape his fate, to fight it.

Which, it suddenly occurred to Squall, was really the difference between the two of them. Fate had thrown a yoke on Squall, and Squall, who did not like bending at the knee, had nonetheless ended up going along with it. While Seifer had stayed on the path of the reckless dreamer, the arrogant defier of Fate. What possible end could he expect, having done that?

As if to answer the question, there came a rattling from the bars and the sound of jangling keys. Seifer tensed, reached for his gunblade. Why his jailers had given him his gunblade was beyond Squall. Sure, in the D-District they were incompetent enough to throw everybody's weapons in a pile in the hall. But at least they took them away. Otherwise prisoner riots would have been easy to pull off.

Well. Easier.

_If they magic me again, then I can at least cut one open,_ Seifer thought furiously.

Oh. Magic. How? Garden was fast becoming the center of the world's magic use. Xu had left some GFs with the Galbadians, but Squall knew she was itching to pull them away. She and Cid didn't really like magic in anybody else's hands; letting the Galbadians junction at all was just a matter of diplomacy. But did this mean that Seifer was with the Galbadians? Or were there GFs, and consequently magic users, that Garden didn't know about?

If there were, for all that Squall wasn't as passionately committed as to stockpiling magic as his fellow Garden leaders, he needed to hunt them down. It wasn't that they had GFs. It was that they were using those GFs to enact vigilante justice on his rival. And it turned out, though it was a fairly big to surprise to Squall to discover it, that he was downright territorial about that. And if they turned out to be Galbadians, then he was twice as territorial, because then they were doing it right under his nose, and were clearly scapegoating besides. Seifer hadn't become anything Galbadia hadn't given him the tools to create. If he'd been a monster (and he had been), then that monster had been a Galbadian pet run off its leash.

But the hand that poked through the bars of Seifer's cozy little cage didn't seem Galbadian. Or. At least, not your standard Galbadian. It was too dark. Darker even than Kiros Seagill. And it was holding keys.

Which seemed like the last thing to offer a prisoner you wanted to see executed for reasons of scapegoating vigilante justice.

"Peace, Sir Knight," said a woman's voice. "Fujin sent me."

And there lay the other big difference between Seifer and Squall. Squall was only just now learning how to have friends.

Seifer had always had them.

* * *

Rexa the card queen's father painted cards. And no one else was allowed to; the family had a monopoly going. Which made no sense for a family that was no one, powerless, just standard Dolletian-based midlands trash, but there it was. The perks of having a sorceress in the family.

The other perk of having a sorceress in the family was that she understood secrecy. She kept quiet when asked; it was just what she would ask other people to do for her.

So when her guest told her that no, she would prefer not to alert Garden, against her better judgment, Rexa did not.

Even though obviously she should have. It was the middle of the night. Her father and siblings and son were asleep. Only she was awake, startled out of sleep by an awful noise from the studio. It took her a minute to realize, sending out tendrils of sensing and scanning magic, that it was only her guest, disoriented, having obviously just awoken from a nightmare.

Rexa dithered for a little bit, tidying up her son's things, checking in on him as he slept. She understood that these Garden types weren't often forthcoming with their feelings, and ought to be afforded some time to gather their thoughts. It took all kinds to make a world, even emotionally-stunted mercenary kinds, and Rexa would know, as she'd been all over the world. So she would let a few moments pass before going down to the studio; it was only polite. And, anyway, she preferred a stiff upper lip, preferred not to deal with too much crying and carrying on. It wasn't like she had some Deling City princess in the house, with their twee ways of speaking and their spoiled, snotty attitudes and their cutesy upper-class spice names: Caraway, Calaminth, Ruta.

Awful.

Rexa's family despised Galbadians and Deling City. Always had.

Good thing this one was the exact opposite of all that. Sensible. Reserved. Straight with you. Rexa fixed some cocoa for two, then went downstairs, full of warm feeling for her guest.

And found the studio a shambles, paint and paper everywhere, red splatters on the wall that it took her a half-second to realize were not blood, only Scarlet No. 47.

Her guest held a card aloft. There were no weapons or anything nearby, and Rexa's magic didn't tell her to be wary, so she wasn't. It was a little bit of post-traumatic sociopathy, that was all. Rexa's sister had been the same, when she'd come back from her first Garden field mission.

"It's okay, sweetheart," Rexa said, a little awkwardly because she wasn't by nature a terribly comforting person. But still. She tried to soothe. In fact, she projected soothing, calming magic. She even considered a sleep spell, but dropped that thought when she saw the card.

It was a new card. A figure in a red cowl. Everything hidden but the eyes. That was it. Nothing more. Not poorly painted, but there was nothing inherently scary about the image.

But the values. Those were scary. A on top. A on the right. A on the bottom. A on the left. A winning card in every way. Something you couldn't defend against, or convert to your side.

Rexa pried it out of Fujin's hand. Fujin was not a card-maker, and hadn't thought to name it, to put the attribution in old Nah along the bottom edge, as was custom with first-edition Triple Triad cards.

Fujin just told her what it was.

"NETHER RIPPER," Fujin said. "NETHER RIPPER."


	10. Chapter 10

Miles and miles away, and at some indeterminate point in the past, Squall still faced his own kind of bad dream.

Seifer.

Now, Seifer rarely thought about Squall. He didn't need to. Their dynamic was something Seifer so understood, deep in the fabric of him, that he had no reason to think about it; it just existed inside him: boring, recognized, accepted. So his brain never showed the truth as he saw it.

Even perched inside Seifer's mind, Squall never saw it.

But Seifer's opinion on Squall was simple: they were in some ways the same. In mediocre ways. In ways that would have made enraged Seifer if he stopped to think about them, so he never did. Deep down, he knew, he and Squall operated according to the same big question. Deep down, the same fear had molded them. Deep down, for years, ever since before Garden, ever since the Orphanage, ever since the days of Cid - they'd always asked themselves:

_What if nobody wants me? What if I'm not worth anything to anybody?_

Seifer's was a cast-off generation, an unwanted bunch, a group the recovering world had no place for. Until Garden. Orphans went to Garden because Garden and Cid Kramer could make them useful, could give them a skill, could put a gun or knife or both in their hands. And as far as most of them knew, if that didn't make you valuable, if that didn't make you worthwhile, if that didn't mean that people had to _listen_ to you, then nothing could or ever would.

Seifer knew that.

Squall - now Squall had retreated into aloofness. He'd always been a little childish, scared to find out if others thought he was worthless. So he'd become like a frightened animal, and curled up in the dark, personal cave of his own mind, and pretended people had nothing to offer him. This was something Seifer had always understood about him. If Squall had sometimes deigned to give in to Seifer's pokes and prods, it had been out of a fundamental misunderstanding: he'd assumed that Seifer was like him, and had his own aloof cave somewhere.

No. Wrong. Boring, stupid, inadequate way of dealing with it. Seifer was smarter than that - he knew he was.

In the ways that counted, he wasn't like Squall. He'd never wanted a cave. He'd seen the cave offered, sometimes. There was something to Squall that kept him from being as much a mystery as he would have liked, some brief shuttering of the eyes in the moment before he dismissed you. Seifer suspected Rinoa had seen it: Squall's humanity. Seifer had, the flicker of emotion Squall tried to hide: a desperate, unconscious wish that someone would join him in his solitude. But Seifer had always, in various ways, refused the invitation. He wasn't a lion; he'd never wanted to curl up away from people.

Mind, he had nothing against lions. As fantasies went, being a lion was fine.

The lion was... Well. A creature of legend. It wasn't boring and regular like a T-Rexaur; it existed in the collective consciousness, eternal. Everybody knew that a Lunar Cry several hundred years ago had finished the last of the real lions off, and they were now just bleached collections of bones in museums. But there were books about them; there was an abiding fascination for them. Writers said that, when judgmental eyes looked at a lion, the lion gave a roar of warning to force them away. And with that task accomplished, it stalked off, proud and magnificent, to be by itself, away from all judgments, perfect and arrogant.

But if the lion was Squall? Heh.

Seifer figured that all the while that lion had to be thinking something weaker, something stupider than people might expect from it. Something smaller, more babyish. More stunted. Thinking: _why are they looking at me? I wish they wouldn't. Everyone is thinking about me, but I wish they'd stop._

It wasn't that Seifer didn't understand this. Other people - other people might look at you and decide that you were of no value, after all: that you were worthless. But Seifer had a better way to fight that off, didn't he? No isolation for him, no stupid lockup in his own mind. When people looked at him with judgment, he didn't run away from it. He thought: _They're looking at me. Good. As long as they're thinking about me, I can't be nothing. So Let them look._

Attention, that was the thing. If they looked at you for too long, then they might discover that they didn't want you, and they might leave. That was really Squall's fear. But to Seifer, as long as they were looking, then they had to admit that you had some hold on them. If they looked away for even a second, then you were screwed. You'd be forgotten.

You really would have no value then.

So where Squall was defensive, hiding away, Seifer was a constant arrogant offensive against the prying eyes of the world.

Maybe it was an unthinking life. Maybe. Squall, in his cave, had time to reflect on and abandon a thousand solitary thoughts. Seifer didn't. The offensive, to be successful, required that he engage with everyone, demand attention from everybody. Zell Dincht, an easy target. Then moving from Dincht on to Squall, who ignored him more often than not, and threw the whole offensive into danger. And then on from Squall to Instructor Trepe, a Garden stooge, so desperate to be valuable that she forgot to think of the needs of other people, to consider that they might want approval and value themselves.

Thorough all this - Seifer's thoughts - he put them on hold. He was intelligent; he knew he was. But he had no use for careful thinking. He had no time to process himself fully, no time to become self-aware, no desire to, either. He knew he had no desire to. Why care about that? He was too busy stalking from moment to moment, taking in ideas and opinions with the rapidity and determination of any great ego searching for a boost. And ejecting out his own ideas, tossing out rapid-fire bits of recklessness, collected hungrily, always hungrily, from old Knights' sagas and Garden training manuals and conversations with Cid; he could spit this out at other people in a threatening, grandiose way, desperate to force himself to everyone's attention, pleased to show off his knowledge, his worth.

Seifer felt a distant flicker of that worth when a young woman came into his cell. When she said, "Peace, Sir Knight."

Now, there was at this point no sensible reason to take pleasure in being addressed as a Knight. None. Seifer knew that, too. Knighthood had brought him utter failure, had revealed his worst qualities, had laid him out as a frightened child or a monster (depending on the level of sympathy possessed by his audience for the villain's role). But, inexplicably, knowing he was still a Knight in some circles did bring him pleasure. As a Knight he had, for a moment, commanded the eyes of every single human being in the world. And if there was some pain inside him to do with that, some horrible sense of regret, it blinked at him dully from behind his hungry arrogance.

He decided not to consider it.

He didn't want to face regret. He had a creeping feeling somewhere inside that regret was - regret was an emotion that could rule a person. He didn't want that. So the small prickle of regret and shame shook him only deep down. Squall saw only echoes of it and couldn't parse it. Seifer smothered it as soon as it appeared.

"Fujin told me about you. She's a friend of yours," continued the woman, as though to show him credentials, to convince him that she deserved to be speaking to him.

Even trapped in a cell, Seifer took this as his due. And he said, "No," almost as a reflex. Friends were people you shared the spotlight with. And he had a long tradition, ingrained habit at this point, of not doing that with anyone. If he and a friend were fishing, and the friend snagged a prize before him, his response would be tinged with fury. His concern? The spotlight, momentarily stolen.

He had friends, but he couldn't be one. And he didn't care, he thought. Why should he? Why think about it-even? Why use the term? He avoided even using the word friend. He banished it down.

(Squall, inside his mind, felt this happen. And felt a strange grimness come over him in response.)

"She's part of my posse," Seifer said.

This caused some confusion. The girl didn't understand posses, evidently; they had about as much meaning for her as friends did to Seifer. But she was forthright and quickly brushed away her confusion in favor of the task at hand. In this, there was something of Rinoa in her (both Seifer and Squall thought this at the same time; they had both been subjected to Rinoa at her most forthright), and so she only said, "Fujin's my friend now, anyway. I'm Renata. She said you would trust me if I showed you this—"

She produced a small token, a kind of flat disc that had meaning to Seifer, but not to Squall. It didn't make Seifer trust her, because he trusted few people. But it did make him take the disc and pocket it; also it told him she wasn't lying, though he didn't bother to think on it more that that.

Renata said, "We have to get you out of here."

Squall expected Seifer to feel relieved at this. The cell brought Seifer only mounting fury, after all. But then Seifer was used to some degree of fury, some low simmer of anger in the back of his mind, less muted than all his other emotions, but still normal, almost a boring personal tradition he couldn't break free of. And so he wasn't relieved at the thought that he might escape. He was irritated.

He had a purpose – his own purpose – for being in this place. Maybe not this cell, not really; that was an unintended consequence (unintended consequences usually followed Seifer wherever he went). But he'd come here – to this particular city – full of aim and daring, looking for something.

His mind didn't touch on what that something was, and so Squall wasn't to learn it. But the reveal that Seifer was here by his own design set Squall to thinking ten thousand confused thoughts. Seifer remained perfectly unaware of even one of them.

"To where?" Seifer said. "Where are you plannin' on takin' me?"

He needed to stay, he thought.

Though again, briefly, regret reared its head, and this time Squall caught a full glimpse of it. It came in the form of two limits, _Fujin_ joined by _Raijin_, and it suggested that perhaps they weren't in cells as nice as his, and acknowledged that they wouldn't leave without him (they'd done this only once in all the years Seifer had known them); and that maybe it would mean something, something worthy and valuable, if he escaped with them. Together. As friends.

But this was...

No.

No, was he so stupid that he'd abandon his mission? So worthless? So weak?

"Where am I taking you?" Renata said, thrown off by the question. She, like Squall, had assumed that leaving the cell would be enough to make Seifer agree. "Back to where you belong, of course!"

Seifer scoffed.

He didn't feel that he belonged anywhere. Squall processed this.

_He thinks like that,_ Squall thought, very quietly, privately, and a little shamefully, _Because he's so arrogant. That's how arrogant people think. They force themselves away. And keeping themselves apart... it leaves them dissatisfied wherever they go._

_You can't be at home with other people if you're always on a ledge, scoffing down at them._

In spite of this, Squall believed that Seifer still belonged at Garden.

But Garden, in Seifer's estimation, hadn't given Seifer Almasy much beyond Fujin, Raijin, and a gunblade to show his worth. But he hadn't given Garden very much either. And he'd taken from Garden maybe more than his fair share. It still flashed in Seifer's mind as the one place where he might belong, a momentary echo that gave Squall some hope. Seifer clearly felt a kind of muted satisfaction in knowing Garden was still there, with its familiar rules and manuals and its stooges of all stripes.

But of course he knew he could never go back, not after what he'd done. That Seifer was thinking of Garden at all was only habit. Habit, rearing its head again. Garden was the only place he'd ever really lived, aside from the orphanage. But having lived there didn't make it where he belonged, didn't make it home. People at Garden didn't like him. And Cid with him was indulgent and chastising in turn, capricious; sometimes a pseudo-father, sometimes a pseudo-Commander, never really effectively both and therefore always throwing Seifer off-balance, making him uneasy, unsure whether he had any worth to Cid and Cid's organization.

And so for a long time Seifer hadn't felt at home in Cid's Garden. He'd only ever felt at home in his dreams.

He figured most people were only nighttime dreamers. They were stunted. They'd wake and shake off their dreams and continue along their way, unaffected, suspecting that 'dream' was just another word for a passing whim, empty air, nothing to really concern themselves with.

But Seifer dreamed even during the day.

Even he knew that was a hazard. Daytime dreamers were the kind of people who could believe, in their heart of hearts, that any dream could come true. And to act on that belief. Even at the cost of other people.

Seifer thought of Rinoa then. He'd cost her a lot. He was almost certain that she hated him. But, even having discarded and mistreated her, he still felt a pang of fondness. She was also a daytime dreamer. She was like him.

_Too bad you torpedoed your chances with her,_ thought Squall, not feeling bad at all.

But Rinoa, like Fujin and Raijin, caused unexpected and uncomfortable pangs of regret. So Seifer shoved away the thought of her.

Renata evidently found his continued silence perplexing. She came closer to him, questioningly. She said, "You have to understand: they're going to place you in the—"

And then she said something in a strange language. It was familiar to both Squall and Seifer, but they couldn't understand it just then; they didn't carry it within them. It was only the language their sorceresses had gifted them with, sometimes. The hard _k_ language.

Seifer stared at Renata. Was she a sorceress?

The thought filled him with two powerful sensations: horror and hunger.

* * *

"You can't be serious," Rexa told Fujin. "No. No, no, no, no, no."

"I left something down there," Fujin said.

She was mostly over her trauma. Enough to speak sense. Or enough to suppress the trauma and pretend she was fine, anyway.

That business with the cards had been an embarrassing bout of fear. Here she was, one mug of cocoa later, trying to avoid looking at the battered studio and the creepy creepy card she'd handed Rexa. And she was ashamed of herself. That display of terror wasn't worthy of a member of the DC. And it wasn't what she needed right now. She had barely-healed wounds, dark circles under her eyes, and a creeping instability dancing around the edges of her mind that she was only fighting off by the skin of her teeth. But she also had a job to do, and people to rescue.

"Your brother."

"AMONG OTHERS," Fujin said, deliberately lapsing into her old speech patterns.

Most people found the way she spoke intimidating. And, when people were intimidated, they didn't attempt to dissuade you from doing the reckless and necessary things that you weren't supposed to do. Every member of the Disciplinary Committee knew this. That was why they spent so much time intimidating people. If they didn't, they'd never get anything important done.

Unfortunately, Rexa the card queen wasn't easily intimidated.

"The black grounds are cursed," she snapped.

"DON'T BELIEVE IT."

"Well, they're creepy anyway. And you'll probably die. And Seifer Almasy? Not worth dying for. Leave him rotting in hell. He deserves it."

"NOT HIM," Fujin said. She inspected her rucksack, supplies courtesy of the Card Queen herself, clinically. Did she need more elixirs and phoenix downs? And weapons, for that matter? Probably. But then an infinite supply would likely not be enough.

"Oh, good," said Rexa. "Wait. What? You're not doing it for him?"

Fujin waved her off. Of course she was doing it for Seifer. And Raijin. Walking back into hell like this? She wouldn't have done it for anyone else. She'd corrected Rexa because Rexa had intimated that Seifer was down there.

And of course at this point they had no way of knowing if Seifer was down there. Fujin told herself that Seifer wasn't. He wasn't. Seifer might be long gone. That was the whole problem.

* * *

Quistis's companions wouldn't stop screaming, and they wouldn't wake up, and the only change after fifteen minutes of shaking them and panicking seemed to be that sometimes they switched to groaning yelps of alarm and frightened roars, instead of pitched shouts of sheer terror.

She cast a Blue Magic-modified silence spell over both of them. This didn't really help them. Except possibly it did soothe their vocal chords a little, since now they were screaming soundlessly; she really didn't know. Garden wasn't like Esthar. How magic worked wasn't half as interesting to the SeeDs as just making sure you worked it better than the other guys did.

She didn't want to leave her friends. But she didn't really know what else to do. She'd called in to Garden and reached nothing but Xu irritatedly telling her that Irvine had been arrested (_what_? Arrested? Was there something in the water tonight?), then passing her off to Nida to deal with because sorry Quistis, but your sleazy little friend got Caraway to lock him up in Galbadia; I'm not sure how your news could be any worse than that.

Quistis let her keep that happy illusion. Xu didn't really give her time to do otherwise before cutting her end of the call. And Nida was their Ancient Centran expert. If something about the crater, and all that odd crystal, and all that secret ancient script – if that was what was causing this? Then maybe Nida would know how to fix it.

But Nida seemed as baffled as she was.

"On the other hand," he told her, "That's fascinating."

"Screaming," Quistis said, trying to impress on him the severity of the moment. "Faces twisted in unholy terror, awful grimacing, I keep worrying Zell's going to wet himself—"

"Squall doesn't seem like the wet the bed type," Nida put in. "Far too cool for that. Surprised to learn he even sleeps, really."

Quistis blinked at the vidscreen.

"Of course he sleeps. He's a person, Nida," she said. "Not just the Commander."

"Sure, but I really look up to him," Nida said, like this somehow related to his assuming Squall didn't perform ordinary human functions. And like it didn't contradict how very blithe he was to discover that Squall was trapped in some kind of nightmare trance. "Our own Mister Murcielago, you know. Hangs up his weapon at the end of the day only to take it back up again when wrongs need righting. Maybe even hangs upside-down like a bat, lying in wait, though I guess Ms. Rinoa might mind it if he did that—"

What? Who? What was he even talking about?

Quistis rifled through her brain. Oh, Hyne. A comic book character out of the cheapest Timber presses. Nida was comparing Squall to a comic book character. Nida was an inoffensive soul, for the most part, who followed orders and had not a shred of ego to speak of. But there was a reason he was on tactical support, and wasn't, you know. A real SeeD. A field mission SeeD.

"Nida," she snapped. "Squall is as human and normal as you or me. He's not some depressed and troubled gillionaire with a private arsenal of weapons and a weird obsession with a very specific animal and some secret personal mission and dead parents and, more importantly, right now—"

"No, I heard," Nida said. "His dad's totally alive. Good for him."

Irritated, Quistis reflected that Nida was lucky he'd come to Garden. Anywhere else, and he would have been lined up against a wall and shot.

"Nida," Quistis said, speaking very carefully to clear her head and cover her rising panic. "Listen to me. I am on a mission. My team has been momentarily incapacitated, and I worry that whatever's happening to them could have long-term effects. We may or may not be able to _complete_ this mission if I don't get them back, and – okay, granted – it's a stupid mission, more a favor for Cid than anything else, but—"

"Oh, well there you go," Nida said.

Quistis blinked at him again.

"Cid," Nida told her. "He knows all about this stuff. Centran expert, Cid. I mean, Cid taught me the language."

"Cid taught you how to read it?" Quistis said.

Okay. Okay, that was weird.

"Yep," said Nida. "Bet he knows more than I do."

What. The. Adelfucking. Fuck.

"He could decipher those crytograms or whatever?" said Quistis. "The ones we sent you? The ones we spent all day photographing to get to you?"

"Made no sense that you guys were calling me in," Nida continued cheerfully. "Figured he was just being nice by bringing me into the loop. Cid can be really great like that. I never had a dad, but it's like, 'eh.' Once I came to Garden I had Cid, you know? Always there to give a kind word. Always—"

"Watch them," Quistis snapped at him, setting up her phone so that he got a good view of Squall and Zell tossing and turning and soundlessly screaming. "Cid's got some explaining to do."

"What?" Nida said, thrown off (for once, Quistis was not the one off-balance in the conversation). "Oh, I—They look bad. And it's nearly three in the morning!"

"Watch them," Quistis snapped again. She figured that if something happened to either of them, Nida would at least be able to alert other Garden personnel. Hopefully. Maybe. A small side of her suspected he'd just take notes and then delightedly cross reference them with extremely esoteric texts on Ancient Centran cult poisonings or something. She really didn't want to leave them with him like this. She wished fairly desperately for Selphie and Rinoa and Irvine, but they were who knows where and Hyne only knew and in prison, respectively. Apparently, anyway.

So it fell to her to shake Cid down for the truth.

She left the orphanage full of angry determination. The moon hung high in the sky, oddly bright when seen from Centra, brighter than it was at night in Balamb. There were monsters on it, of course; it was a hideous, ugly thing, a pale factory of terror. But from here it just looked round and white and luminous and perfect. She almost regretted needing her mage light, that bright blue ball that interfered with the perfect night, to guide her down the rocky path, around the stretch of shore, and all the way to Cid's cottage.

Something about the Centra moon seemed holy, full of special meaning. It brought her an odd kind of confidence. Confidence of any kind was a thing she didn't normally have. But here the sandy path, the crumbling columns with childish scribbles scratched into them, even the patterns of where the brushweed grew on the silvery shore, all seemed familiar to her. And cleansing in their familiarity. She'd grown up here, before Dollet. She'd been happy and whole here. She hadn't been plagued by doubt, thrown off-balance. It was easy to feel whole here. It was easy to feel not like Quistis Trepe, Garden poster girl and massive fake, spouting off about self-assurance she didn't feel herself. Instead, she became just a child. A little girl. Sneaking out along the rocky shore, joining the others for a wild bonfire night, not inhibited, unafraid to defy Matron and Cid.

She rapped furiously on the door when she reached the cottage. The windows were dark, but she didn't mind waking Cid up. Matron's flower pot was still lolling sadly around on the ground. The brilliant red blossoms were bleached grey by the nighttime, and dying fast now that they'd been upended from their soil.

Cid didn't answer. That was fine. He had to get out of bed, after all. And she could use the time to knock louder. A furious staccato of knocks. They rapped out a pattern only she understood:

You!

Fat!

Old!

Liar!

Cid lying to her was very personal – probably far more personal and intense and painful than the others could know of or understand. She'd been an instructor under him, after all. Supposedly his equal (in practice, though, never that). The others had only been cadets, or, in Selphie and Irvine and Rinoa's fortunate cases, not once exposed to his special brand of fatherly obfuscation.

No answer. She knocked louder. Still no answer. The secret pattern acquired several mental curses and some very creative epithets. Still no answer. She tested the knob. Locked. The windows were closed and also locked. She circled around to the back door. Also locked. All the windows were closed. The windowboxes with their grey moonlit flowers seemed to be taunting her. The place didn't have a chimney to creep down through or exposed sewer lines running into it, so there went the usefulness of that particular Garden seminar.

Breaking a window to get in was an idea hardly worth mentioning: it was so rude. On a real mission, it would have been fine. But this was Cid's house. And Cid's strange little mission.

She was paralyzed by indecision.

Surely she could…wait? Knock more? Cid was there, right?

But then her friends flashed in her mind. Squall, always so handsome and silent and perfect, now with his face twisted in ugly horror, shouting soundlessly. Zell, that unruly little brother who she'd always had to look out for, all his energy gone senseless, nothing but a pile of thrashing limbs. She wasn't like Rinoa and could _absolutely_ control her powers, thank you very much, but these mental images upset her so much that a burst of blue magic suddenly eviscerated the doorknob on the back door.

Well. Maybe Cid shouldn't have locked it.

Quistis pushed her way inside.

Cid wasn't home.

And his place was a mess.

Squall had been here earlier in the day, but he hadn't mentioned the books scattered around the shelves, the vials and bottles upended in the kitchen area, the papers all over the floor. Had Cid been attacked? No, no. That made no sense. Who came in to attack someone, and then locked the door after they left?

Cid had gone. In a hurry.

He was nowhere to be found. The bathroom was fairly neat, compared to the rest of the house, but someone had opened the medicine chest in the corner and rifled through it before leaving. There were some stoppered bottles of tough, thick glass filled with clear liquid in the tub, matching the empty bottles in the kitchen, but aside from this she found only the accouterments of a hasty departure made by a middle-aged man. A smear of shaving cream on the mirror, uncapped toothpaste, the toothbrush lolling sadly in the sink, house slippers abandoned haphazardly near the toilet.

And an odd slip of paper with Centran script jotted on it, and underneath that script some peculiar words in Cid's loopy hand.

_Within our heart so cold and dark,_  
_Where live the faithful lost,_  
_I do assemble one by one_  
_My most obedient host._  
_No light can be unless we bring_  
_Forth shadows from below._  
_And to reclaim ourselves as king_  
_A garden we will grow._  
_We plant in sun so many seeds_  
_To lead the army good_  
_The dread domain will then reclaim_  
_Each one – the l_

He'd circled the final line in red pen, with so much force that she had difficulty making out any more words beyond that last _l_. Weird. Was Cid translating the Centran? Because he was a liar and hadn't told them that he knew Ancient Centran? Or was he just a crappy poet who didn't know how to finish his work? As well as a liar hadn't told them that he knew Ancient Centran.

Quistis went into the bedroom. Cid's poetry wasn't going to help her. She had to figure out where Cid had gone, then get him back, then get him to diagnose Squall and Zell. That was the plan. Only the bedroom was just as mystifying as the bathroom was. It did smell, as Squall had reported, faintly like blood. She found the source soon enough: a pile of bloody bedsheets tucked in a hamper behind the full-length mirror. Weird. Really weird. She ripped off one long strip of sheet, in case they needed to test it. Or. Well. Because she wanted to test the blood, because this was too strange and too horrible and so completely not Cid, not at all. Cid was pudgy hands tucked around his stomach, peering down at you over his spectacles, boring cups of tea in the his office and hot dogs cut into small child's pieces because he said it aided with his indigestion. He wasn't secrets and bloody sheets. It made no sense.

On the night table, he'd left a half-eaten biscuit, a spare pair of glasses tucked behind the alarm clock, a book atop some wrapping paper, and atop the book a list of GFs and the SeeDs best suited to junction them. For Xu. She could tell it was for Xu, because Cid had actually tried to put the list into some semblance of order, which was a thing he hardly ever did for anybody else, only for Xu, the one protégé of his who even he seemed a little afraid of. The list ended with a cheerful, _I'm sure you'll find a way to snatch these away from the Galbadians! Think of the profit! _and then three more hastily scrawled names with scattered notes on their possible locations within Galbadia.

Since she figured Xu might want to see it, and since she owed Xu one, she pocketed the list. Then she paused.

The book underneath was called _The Nature of the Knight_. There was a note next to it. Quistis recognized the handwriting on the note because she'd always had to give it a passing grade, in the interests of fairness and rewarding good work. Even though, at times, she'd really wanted to fail him on principle.

_Tell her I don't want her fucking presents._

Seifer Almasy. Communicating with Cid this whole time? Quistis flipped the book over and examined the shiny black wrapping paper with lavender ribbon. Black and lavender. The memory of a memory hit her – these colors had had significance to her once. She wracked her brain trying to figure out how, nudged into consciousness her grumpy, out-of-it GFs, snatched the memory back from them.

Matron. Of course. Black frocks and lavender perfume. Black feathers and lavender hair ornaments. Her secret, personal space at the back of the orphanage, that the children would peek into but never dared intrude on, which smelled like black and purple in smell form, like jasmine crossed with something powerful and masculine, and in a chipped black mug in the kitchen her pens with purple ink, and at every birthday and half-birthday and name day a small token for each child, left on the overstuffed lavender hall chair, wrapped in shiny black paper with lavender ribbon.

Matron had been in touch with Seifer. And Seifer with Cid.

Well, obviously, this was about as useful to her right now as Cid's terrible poetry. But Quistis took the book anyway and stuck it in her bag. She had a ruthless thought that – first of all, Matron hadn't sent her anything over the past seven months, so this was unfair – Seifer had forfeited his orphanage inheritance, in a sense. And it was like Cid to keep in touch with him. Cid had always liked him. Cid's golden fuckup, welcomed even after displaying the kind of arrogance that no one would have accepted from Quistis. He was given Squad Leader, and DC committee head, and if there was some kind of awful, awful alternate universe out there in which by some cruel divine potentate's will he'd managed to pass his SeeD exam, Quistis had no doubt that Cid would have made him instructor right away, and stuck him next to her at every staff meeting.

A memory came to her unbidden. One of her GFs – Diablos, probably, he had a laconic and frankly awful sense of humor – let it fly loose. Seifer after his second SeeD test. Under discipline. She'd thought it was a perfect moment, at the time. Seifer had cost her her instructorship. But finally, finally he'd been cost something in return. Good.

Then they'd made her part of his disciplinary watch team. Typical Cid.

"I think it says something that every member of my Squad passed, didn't they?" he'd said. "I wasn't _wrong_ to make the calls I did. Cid as good as told me that—" His voice had a mocking bite to it, sardonic and petty and mean. He'd wanted to take the credit for his teammates' hard work. Squall's hard work.

"And you didn't pass," she'd retorted. "Who cares what Cid tells you? Your failure tells you everything you need to know right there."

Seifer had done exactly what she'd wanted him to. Gone white with rage, his hands fisted in his pants, his knuckles bleached. She and Xu could always dress him down effectively. She figured that was why Cid forced him on them, year after year. Cid himself didn't want to dirty his hands disciplining his pet disciplinarian. It would have made him seem mean, would have tarnished everything he liked to think about himself. Fatherly Cid.

So it fell to Quistis to do it. And she did it gladly, because it wasn't like it made any difference. It didn't make Seifer any likelier to respect her. It just showed him that there were people out there who wouldn't be bullied by him.

But something strange had happened. Instead of snapping back, or making threatening proclamations to his lackeys, as was his wont, Seifer had grown quiet. After a minute, in a low voice, he'd said, "Cid was never gonna pass me anyway. He as good as told me. They needed somebody at fault—"

"You disobeyed orders," Quistis had snapped.

"I was right to!" Seifer had said. "That's how you knew what was goin' on in the first place. And Cid's not punishing me for that. He's punishing me because somebody has to be punished – somebody always _has_ to be punished here—"

"Yes, and now finally you're not the one picking who to punish. You're the scapegoat. Good," Quistis had told him, just to rub it in. Because he and the rest of the DC existed basically to do that – to lord their power over others, to pick out students for stupid infractions, to show up instructors with their bad attitudes. It was about time someone turned the tables on him.

"And, just so you know, Seifer?" she'd said. "Cid gave Squall your mission. The contact you set him up with."

Rinoa.

Seifer had gotten free after that, and Quistis had had to go after him, angry the whole time, but still level-headed enough not to do anything completely ridiculous like hold a gunblade to Vinzer Deling's throat. That fell to Seifer, because Seifer was like that, and in the end he'd been defeated and received his just desserts, and Quistis had been made instructor again, because there were some injustices the world just had to set right.

Only now apparently Matron and Cid were keeping in touch with Seifer. Reaching out to him. Sending him presents.

Why not the rest of them? Or were they communicating with the rest, and just not with her? Why? Had she done something wrong? Had they expected more from her? Cid had never liked her, not really. She knew it deep in her bones. He had a careful hand with Squall, an indulgent one with Seifer, and even Zell he probably liked because only horrible people didn't like Zell. But Quistis? What use was she to him?

In answer to this question, Cid's alarm clock went off. This was a perplexing answer. It didn't really get at the heart of her upset. Also, it was the middle of the night. She discovered why it was ringing soon enough, because it was tucked inside the night table drawer, next to several medications and a very strict treatment schedule sketched out in Dr. K's tidy hand. Cid was supposed to be taking a pill right now. What had made him depart before doing that?

Musing, Quistis set the pills and schedule down, and took up the clock to turn it off.

And discovered she'd been away for nearly an hour. Crap. Crap crap crap crap crap. That was far too long to leave Squall and Zell with Nida's rather clueless vidphone face. And she'd found nothing to help them, to boot.

She gathered up her finds and rushed back to the orphanage as quickly as she could, hoping desperately that she'd find them both miraculously cured, awake and alert and fine, blissfully normally silent in Squall's case and less blissfully normally loud in Zell's. But they were still tossing and turning when she got back, faces still grimacing, mouths still opening and closing in silent screams.

Nida wasn't even looking at them. He was looking at something else. When she picked up the vidphone to berate him over it, he said, "Strangely, Squall seems more subdued, of the two. So initially I thought Zell was going through something worse."

"How would you know?" Quistis said angrily. "I told you to watch them. You're not doing that!"

"Well, yes, but it gets old after a while," Nida said, blinking at her. "Anyway, as I was saying, initially I thought Zell's dreams had to be worse. But Squall's clenching his hands more, he's bitten his bottom lip until it's bled—"

Quistis checked this. He was right. Cursing, she cast a paralysis spell on them both, terrified they'd hurt themselves more.

"—so I think it's about equal. Squall just deals with it in a more dignified way, even in sleep. He's really impressive, you know. Did Cid help you?"

The sudden change in topic unnerved her even more than it did when Cid was the one responsible, possibly because everything about this situation was terrible. She could handle missions. She could handle prisons, the terror of incoming missiles, monsters falling from the sky, the building she'd lived in for half her life suddenly turning into a spaceship.

She had never felt as awful as she did right now, on this night, with two boys she'd known since childhood depending on her. She'd always wanted people to depend on her. Told herself that she liked that. Positioned herself as the most professional, the most confident, the coolest, the dependable one. It had seemed to her that when people wanted you and relied on you, you could be happy. You could be liked, and then maybe you could like yourself.

But now there was no one to depend on but her, and she didn't like it one bit.

"Cid's gone," she said, miserable in such a way that it bled into her throat, came out with her words, making them savage.

Nida looked at her, confused. "Where would he go?"

"How should I know? I didn't even know he knew Ancient Centran! And now I have no idea who to go to for help!"

"Xu's still conferencing with the Galbadians," Nida said. "I've been translating as fast as I can, but there's nothing here so far that even points to what's happening to them. As far as I can tell, the very first inscriptions come out to 'Within our heart so cold and dark, where live the faithful lost—'"

"'I do assemble, one by one, my most obedient host'," Quistis finished.

"You know it!" Nida said, delighted. "I thought I was the only one who—"

Quistis ignored him. "It was a translation from the Centran."

Of course it was. Of course Cid had not only lied to them, but also gone and translated it first.

"Wait, do _you_ know Centran?" Nida asked, half-confused, half-excited.

Quistis gave him a withering look.

* * *

Squall wasn't to know Cid was a liar, wasn't to know Cid's mission had no purpose. He wasn't thinking about Cid at all. He was thinking of Edea. There was a reason she scared Seifer; there was a reason Seifer remained desperate for her even through his fear.

Seifer's sorceress had worn a mask, the mask of the only woman he'd ever called mother, though he hadn't known it at the time.

A mother - now that was a strange idea. Through stories and sagas, he'd learned that a true mother was nothing like Cid Kramer. She wasn't mercurial. She didn't give parental affection while taking with mercenary punishment; she never needed children to prove themselves to her.

She always, always believed that they had worth.

In fact if she really had been his mother, she would have made no impression on him, because not having to prove himself was a completely foreign concept. Most people thought he was worthless, a troublemaker, the eternal cadet: his life was one long campaign of ego and cruelty against them. So it was just as well that, for Ultimecia, the mother thing was an act, a kind of puppetry. The truth came through in her words. He understood her words.

She told him that she could drag him out of childhood.

Childhood, to him, meant being valueless. Without power. Waiting for his next SeeD test, waiting for instructors to chastise him, waiting, always waiting, and without control. At the mercy of Cid and the Shumi guardians and his stooges, at the mercy of people's judgmental eyes, their small and petty digs. That Seifer was a dreamer – able to conjure up visions of something better, of a grander future, of being a Knight and worthy protector – only made it worse. Squall had accepted his boredom and fear and hopelessness, even if he hadn't wanted to and had later changed his tune. But Seifer had fought against their condition every step of the way.

Until Matron (for it was Matron, kind Matron, beautiful Matron) reappeared. And was horrible. Powerful, cruel, monstrously egotistical – everything Seifer himself had ever been. He recognized that about her at once. This wasn't the mother he'd buried below layers of GF-conditioning, kind and lovely and good. This was some arrogant creature that seized his attention as soon as she appeared, and refused to let go, prodding at him far more terribly than he'd ever prodded at Dincht.

Before him she dangled his dream. At first it was nothing more than a some spell that she used, a convincing nudge to get him to let go of Vinzer Deling's neck, to make him come forward to greet her, to paste a smile on his face, a wondrous smile, a calm acceptance that he was dangling over some precipice, and she was going to drop him in. But it didn't take much to make him accept that fate all on his own. Seifer had been primed for it his whole life. He'd been afraid of being valueless. Well, here was value. The value of being a very good villain, of being infamous, so that no one could brush aside his name or call him an eternal cadet ever again. He'd also adored the spotlight, longed for respect. Well, here it was. The respect that came when people had no choice but to respect him, when ten million eyes looked up at him in horror. And, beyond that, he'd always wanted a cause, some purpose, something bigger than Garden, something give him some meaning. He'd struggled to be a SeeD for so long, as though SeeD might do that for him, because of course for people like him there were few other avenues to greatness; it was SeeD or Galbadia, and Galbadia cared nothing for you if you didn't have power to begin with. But he had, over time, stopped iwanting/i to be a SeeD.

SeeD wasn't knighthood. It wasn't protecting others, not really. It wasn't proving yourself in any way that counted. SeeD was mercenary thinking, and only counting out your gil. SeeD was following orders for reasons not quite specified but never questioned, turning killing into humdrum routine. SeeD was life spent in train cars and going over mission reports, and Seifer could do that: he was good at it. But he chafed at it, and they saw that he chafed, and SeeD had responded accordingly, by giving him the label of troublemaker and scapegoat. And so shortly before the sorceress came to him, Seifer had stopped even thinking that SeeD was a possibility.

So there he'd been, months ago in Timber. Hearing the hard ik/i underneath Edea's speech, hearing the whispers of a language he'd thought was meant only for him, hearing the offer he wouldn't have turned down for anything. Ensorcelled. This initial spellbound moment was something Seifer would admit to himself, and this is what he was thinking of, and that was what Squall saw, and it accorded with Squall's own assessment of him. Because Squall thought he was pitiful, and nothing was more pitiful than that moment of horror, when Edea's eyes had coolly measured him and discovered exactly where to prod, exactly how to make him Ultimecia's lapdog.

But Seifer'd had more agency than he dared to think about. He'd had a hand in his own destruction, though he shoved the truth of this down in order to consider Renata's offer, and so unwittingly kept Squall from being privy to it.

Here was what Squall didn't see:

As Seifer's Knighthood had progressed, he'd stopped being really ensorcelled. She'd needed to use magic less and less. This was a truth he didn't come out with even to his posse. They'd seen him losing himself and assumed it was magic. Everyone thought it was magic. In the days after the war, the people of Fisherman's Horizon had looked on him sadly and proclaimed him as pathetic and trampled as any of Adel's laboratory subjects. The iDollet Tribune/i had run an article on how he'd likely lost his mind. Squall Leonhart, hitting suddenly on the spot in the training center that had always been the DC's special hunting grounds, had been struck by how Ultimecia must have mind-controlled Seifer to isome/i extent. Must have. Because the figure he'd cut at the end of the war, his clothing in disarray, his eyes haunted, his face shadowed and narrow and his wrists bony and brittle, was nothing like the young terror who'd once stalked B-Garden's halls.

People assumed that over time the spell on him had intensified. Had worn him down. Ultimecia's control had destroyed him. This made sense.

It was also wrong. He'd destroyed himself. And she hadn't needed to control him. She hadn't needed to use her magic at all, by the end. This was the genius of Ultimecia's scheme. She'd recognized in Seifer something much more useful than an unthinking lackey. She had seen in him a marvelous future addict.

The best Knights were addicts. High-functioning ones, to be sure. But still addicts. They cleaved to Hyne's children because they had an overpowering need to assert themselves, a desire to be seen, to live, to be valued, to not be abandoned as worthless; they were hungry for acknowledgement, for glory. Seifer was of course no exception. The dreamer in him had always wanted not dull navy cadet uniforms and a condescending pat from Cid, but glorious pennants of scarlet and secret smiles full of promise and reward. He'd never really wanted to make A rank and retire at thirty to strategize for Galbadia, forgotten and fat. He'd instead ripped through old films and stories in search of aims that were more merciful than mercenary, that were beautiful and noble and that cost much, but suggested immortality. Not a life of fighting T-Rexaurs in the Training Center, but Ruby Dragons in the Vienne Range. Reality, Garden, his fellow cadets, all those rules that punished you for thinking for yourself – these things were dull and empty and couldn't sate his need, his desire to know he was worth something. And so he had a hole inside him that he'd stuffed full of dreams, desperately cramming in the flimsiest wishes and hopes, and all the while secretly afraid that this wouldn't be enough to make up for the boring, uninspiring life he was really living.

Ultimecia made the dreams a reality. She removed the fear. She put on the most beautiful form he'd ever seen – Matron, mother, all love, all the nice things he'd forgotten – and she held out her palm and in her palm the flimsy dreams became real. Magic. She'd taken him into presidential palaces, into rooms that were white and clean and full of ancient secrets forbidden to the hoi polloi, into places so far above others that there could be no doubt he would receive immortality. She would tell him, her voice airy and full of self-assured victory, to do things – risky things, cruel things – and he would hesitate, at first. Murder some Deling City secretaries? Rout out the dissidents in the army? Torture a fellow Garden boy? There remained a flicker of dissent inside him, a mundane and awful thing, telling him that this was just like what Cid wanted of him, really. This was just as unthinking, just as lackey-like, just as dull and little and evil; it was wrong.

But his humanity couldn't compete with the fear he had of being worth nothing, of being forgettable and mortal.

So he did as his sorceress asked, over and over, and every time she would reward him. She showed him crowds enraptured by their pairing, screaming adulation. She showed him her true face, hidden and terrible and secret. She took him to her great hall, her castle, the place beyond the edge of time itself. She had a great scrying bowl in which he could see the recesses of time; this was, after all, her great obsession. And with it she showed him a long-ago shore on which he'd played, happy, where he'd built bonfires and held Matron's hand and seen Cid look on him proudly. Ultimecia created for him magic of the highest kind. The magic of memories, of having a place in the world, of understanding his purpose and his life. That most valuable thing: an identity. That was the magic she gave him.

He wasn't a discarded child anymore. He was a person whose lifetime had built and built and built to this one great fate. He was a Knight.

But as the months wore on, he saw her magic less and less. Her tasks for him continued, and became more convoluted, more personal, more daunting. The Lunar Cry on Esthar, a city he'd always been fascinated with. Sending his posse out to find Ellone, using them with no hope of offering them the rewards she offered him. Tossing Rinoa – a friend, a fellow dreamer – into the arms of Adel. And he became more twisted inside, more uncertain, more desperate for his sorceress's reassurance. But that reassurance fell away, as time wore on. He saw less and less the hidden knowledge, the memories he'd lost, the adoring public, even the beautiful language that whispered around the edges of Edea's mouth and crept out to beckon at himt.

But he became hungrier for it. He became obsessed. She stopped needing to magic him; he would just do what she liked on his own, full of his old tenacity and daring, but consumed by a new and horrible need to get back more of his sense of self, to know he was seeing his path through to the end, to perform his part and so imbue it with value and worth and maybe, just maybe, so recapture the promise in her airy voice. He'd felt that might quell the fear inside him, the small dissenting voice that told him he'd become a stooge after all. He wanted to shut that voice up, cast it away. And in the process he became more desperate, more reduced than he'd ever been. Shaking and strung-out.

People looked at him with hatred and scorn. Urged him to stop, told him to give up. But if he'd stopped he really would have been worthless, because then they would have stopped looking at him. And he'd been so twisted inside for so long, so used to being the troublesome center of everyone's attention, that this seemed to him, more and more desperate to be somebody, ianybody/i, to be the only possible path forward.

The one constant in his life was that he always looked forward. He took hits and kept moving. Regrets were buried deep down. Pain was shoved away. The only way he'd ever gotten out of anything was simply by moving past it as though it didn't affect him.

Renata was still speaking, but he'd stopped listening to her some time ago, retreated back into his cryptic sense of purpose. Acknowledged to himself that here, too, he just had to move forward. He stood. She looked up at the length of him, tall, some faraway look in his eye as if he could not process how battered he was. He strode to the corner. His coat hung on a rack of terrific beauty, a green glass thing, intricate and sturdy, but he seized it with such force that the thing over-balanced, and fell to the floor, and shattered.

"Let's go," he said.

Not back to where he'd come from, of course. Not Garden. Never again Garden. But out of the cell, at least.

* * *

The early hours of the morning, March 20th.

Fujin and Rexa approached the black grounds. The earth here was very level, stretching out for ages before it reached the hills blanketing the suburbs of Dollet. It was also, as expected, black.

There were no markers to show that this was where Catkin's army had fallen. That had always annoyed Rexa. She thought there ought to be something. Something other than all this devastating black. After all, Catkin had taken a good few Galbadians with her. That could only be for the best.

But then Dollet had had a strange, horrible relation to its Deling City overlords after the great cataclysmic event. Not quite a serf territory. Always chafing at the bit. But still too afraid to make any overt moves, to openly suggest that, while they treasured their independence, they didn't quite honor the noble shared history of conquest.

So no one had put up even a placard. There was just nothing.

"OPEN IT," Fujin said.

"I've never done this like this," Rexa told her, annoyed and also slightly perturbed.

When she'd first met Fujin, there had been a scrappy, tough, survivalist aspect to the girl. She'd seemed the kind of person who would fight tooth and nail to live. Now she was walking to her death. It wasn't right.

Less right that apparently it fell to Rexa to send her there. Such was the lot of being a sorceress who did not want her secret blabbed to the world. People kept silent, and in return you did them favors. Horrible favors. Rexa decided to try one more time to dissuade Fujin.

"Look, if my cousin found out that you were—"

Fujin whirled on her, fury written all over her skinny face. Her whole body was stretched tight and angry, her hands lifted as though she longed to give Rexa a good slap. She said, "DON'T CARE. DO IT."

Feeling her heart sink, Rexa lifted her hands. She'd only ever done this once, long ago. She'd been very young and very stupid and a very slippery man had talked her into it. She'd since learned how to deal with slippery men, and passed the lesson onto all of her relatives, because she didn't like having to make decisions like this. She didn't like doing this at all.

But the world sometimes answered, when a sorceress needed it to. It helped her out. That was one of those peculiar quirks of being a sorceress.

Fujin's comm. went off. Fujin blinked, like she hadn't even known she had a comm. Then she reached into the pocket of her battered coat. The Seifer Almasy coat. Cid Kramer's voice greeted her. It was as affable and convincing as it had ever been, but of course, as was Cid's way, the words he offered up were terrible and confusing.

He said, loud enough for Rexa to hear, "You've responded! Good, good. I hope you don't mind my keeping tabs. I slipped this into your pocket. I thought we might like to talk. This is bigger than we think, I'm afraid. Meet me at the shoreline. We're going the Trabia route."

"We?" Rexa said. "He was planning on coming with you? _Cid_?"

Fat, cowardly Cid?

Fujin seemed as perplexed as she was.

* * *

A/N: Sorry for the delay in updates! Seifer's sections are slow-going, but they will pick up. Oh boy, will they pick up.


	11. Chapter 11

When Raijin woke just a few hours before, in the night, he was himself again. There was no one in the room: not the first girl, not the second, and, blessedly, not the man in red. Raijin had never been so grateful for anything in his life.

He ached. He knew there were more parts of him broken than there had ever been before and that was saying something, because he'd been a consummate trainer as a cadet and he'd trained with Fujin and Seifer, neither of whom was particularly careful or given to worrying about accidentally injuring a training partner.

He could take a lot of damage. He reminded himself of this. It was odd to have to remind himself, but his brain wasn't right. It felt like there was broken glass in it.

Painfully, he rolled onto his side. He moved his bottom leg until it dropped pathetically to the floor. The second leg followed. He heaved himself off the bed and let his body hit the cold marble underneath, ignoring the shock and pain of it, then lifted himself onto his elbows. His legs were entirely useless - the knees and ankles were broken spots of pain - so it fell to his arms to drag him to a corner where he collapsed, panting with exertion.

It made no sense to have gotten out of bed in the first place. He could see that after a few minutes. But he couldn't just give up. In the first place, he didn't want to return to the torture session. In the second place, he was DC. The DC didn't give up.

Raijin had a curious verbal tic. It made people think he was stupid. Maybe he was stupid, come to think of it. It had never occurred to him that he might be smart. But his speech patterns weren't real evidence of his stupidity. At the end of nearly every sentence he would confer with his audience. 'Ya know?'Did they know? Did they want to? And wouldn't it be nice for them if, just once, they got the impression that someone cared if they knew, and cared about their opinion?

That was Raijin. A very comforting way of speech. Always checking in. Few people at Garden ever seemed to check in with anyone else. He'd followed his sister there – Garden had never been a special dream of his – and on arrival he'd been struck by the beauty of the place, the bustle, the rules and forms and psych evals. And the loneliness. Few people at Balamb Garden bothered to listen to anything beyond orders from above. Certainly they didn't bother to really listen to each other. Many connected in superficial ways: through clubs nobody had much interest in, through sharing the same books at the library, through making untouchable idols of their Instructors, through training exercises and cavern tests. But then they promptly forgot key details about each other, or subsumed themselves in their own drive and ambition (you couldn't pass the SeeD test if you weren't wholly committed to passing; everyone knew that), and on second meeting it was as though you were a stranger.

GFs played a part. But Raijin also put it down to mercenary selfishness, mercenary methods of defense. They were keeping others out, keeping others separate. Because naturally people could die on the SeeD test, or on a mission: every year in the spring there was a memorial ceremony where the names were read out over the loudspeaker. A list of dead classmates as you fidgeted in the quad, as someone next to you whispered about the upcoming Garden festival. And this wasn't the only way you could lose people at Garden. If someone didn't pass their test or Cid or the Shumi didn't like them, they'd eventually be cast out. So there was a curious sense pervading much of Garden that suggested that the more independent you were, the more focused on yourself and less on interpersonal nonsense, the luckier and stronger you naturally had to be.

But Raijin didn't need to prove himself strong. His strength had always been evident. At age nine, he'd already been five feet tall. Now, at nineteen, he was a cool seven. He was broad, too. Nobody had ever assumed he was weak. If anything, he was usually considered a bruiser, a thug, through no fault of his own. People looked up at him with a kind of anticipatory dread, seeing a looming, massive creature, skin and eyes oddly dark, teeth oddly white, the image of some long-ago Estharian plainsman who'd worshipped storms and raided shores far and wide. He stood out. Powerful. Threatening. But he didn't want to seem that way.

So he masked it with concern. And the concern wasn't totally insincere; Raijin really valued people. Seifer and Fujin were top of the list. But other people, too. Raijin didn't junction much because he'd always had enough power in his arms to come off fine during training. And he'd never put himself down for SeeD because he simply hadn't wanted to; he was at Garden to look after his sister; that was all. So GFs had never interfered with his measure of his fellow cadets.

He'd never cared much for Garden as an institution, but its people had always seemed worthwhile and good to him. Squall, not so great in the personality department (but then who was, at B-Garden?), but who tried with every fiber of his being at any task you set him to. Instructor Trepe, who seemed so unfairly lonely for someone so poised and talented and beautiful. Zell Dincht, who brought a much-needed vibrancy and friendliness to Garden, who was immune to the self-interest others carried around with them as closely as they did their weapons. Xu, cruel when she didn't need to be and wasn't trying to be, and yet still not half as cruel as she thought she was. Even weird Nida, who'd helped Raijin conjugate old Centran verbs when Fujin and Seifer had been leaping ahead, intuiting the language with uncommon brilliance, and far too absorbed in their own work to care that Raijin couldn't keep up.

Those two…they were. Well. In just the same way Raijin masked his power, they masked parts of themselves. Fujin barked out every word in terse command. It made people uneasy and scared. It was supposed to. Those were the speech patterns of the plains near Esthar, though of course nobody used them anymore because of course the plains had been razed to bits by Adel and her knight. Fujin and Raijin had learned how to talk like that in FH, on their exiled mother's knee, and Fujin put it to good use keeping people at bay, making sure they didn't think to cross her.

And Seifer? Seifer spoke like a thug. Seifer walked like a thug, and slicked back his hair like one, and sneered like one. Seifer was Garden bred; he didn't seem to have ever learned anything at anybody's knee. He'd had to snatch everything for himself. And he'd snatched up books and sagas and old films, poetry and dead languages and dreams: everything. Seifer was hungry for everything. And if you looked at him – really looked – you could see it.

Seifer wasn't as broad as his coat made him out to be; it was just hard to make that out under the grandiose body language, the clothing. The general domineering demeanor. And he had a pale cast to him, an ashen light underneath his coloring, that few people really noted. Giggling young cadets would whisper that maybe he was golden all over; he always seemed to give the impression - by his own design - that health and strength were vibrating right out of him naturally, effortlessly. Really, though, he was the product of hours spent training and studying and poring over rulebooks, so that he'd always been, in his own way, sun-starved and stunted and starving for something Garden couldn't offer him. He covered this up with his bullying, his lazy hooligan speech. He had a good vocabulary when you caught him off guard (no one who read as much old-timey knight language as he did could fail to learn a few words), and an inner boyish need to be praised, but on the outside, he never showed it. He didn't think anything would ever be handed to him, not even if he'd asked politely or beautifully. So he talked like a brute, a gangster, someone who could simply take. Because he _would_, and it would have been dishonorable to hide that.

In this, there was a kind of honesty to him. As there was with Fujin revealing her lost history, and Raijin revealing his affection for others. The DC were fake when it came to their speech and weird lists and gestures; they were teenage in the worst sense, occasionally cruel and often sardonic and demanding attention at every turn, never stooping to do things the way anyone else did, coating themselves in imitation cool. But even with that. They were real where it counted. Even their masks were designed to show you something true.

They wanted to be true to themselves in some strange way. Not to conform to the great Garden lie, the layer of artifice and superficiality. Instead to be honest, and follow their dreams. Nothing could be nobler.

And someone who was true to himself didn't just curl up and die in a corner, waiting for his torturers to return.

Raijin breathed in. Then out. His breath rattled in his large chest. That wasn't a good sign, but it wasn't the worst, either. His body had always been the most useful thing about him. Resilient. This was why it had taken an attack on his mind to break him. He'd never developed his mind in the same way. He saw the silliness of that now. Fujin and Seifer had always taken care of the plans (Fujin) and the decision-making (Seifer). And he'd always been the muscle. But now his muscle was worth nothing. Every part of him that might put that muscle to use was broken.

He would need to think like his friends to get out of this. So that he could rescue his friends. The girl – the kind one, not the sorceress – had told him that Fujin was out and safe. But safe was a thing Fujin hated being, especially if the rest of the Disciplinary Committee wasn't safe. So Raijin knew with certainty that she'd be back here, with all the force and common sense of a hurricane, to get him out. And to get Seifer out.

This hit Raijin worse than the red man's torture had. Not that she would be back. But that Seifer was… Where was Seifer? He'd been… Raijin's mind recoiled. He couldn't think of it. He couldn't. The pain he received, thinking Seifer was lost, was worse this time than it had been when Seifer had been under Ultimecia's control. Because then some particle of Seifer had remained, some desperate glint in the too-bright eyes.

But now, when he'd last seen Seifer's eyes, they'd been very, very different.

Raijin choked past the thought. He had to be ready for when Fujin came. And he had to figure out what had become of Seifer. He steeled himself, began to plan, to really think. But then someone came in and shrieked to find him gone from the bed and searched the room in a frenzy. She found him huddled in the corner. Then, pity softening her face, she approached him carefully, kindly. Raijin was still reeling from the false kindness of the man in red and didn't quite want to trust her. But then he had no choice.

"My friend…?" he found himself saying, once he was able to summon up a voice. It came out like a croak. Not comforting at all, but broken and scared.

"The Knight. I…I saw him," Renata whispered back. "In his cell. Months ago, before... Well. I tried to help. He didn't want me to; he said to get you out. So - well. You know what happened after that. I'm sorry."

Raijin hadn't wanted to hear that. His weak mind shuddered at it. But then he was able to gather himself up somewhat, to put all those jagged shards of his mind in some kind of order, and he said, with more confidence than he felt, "We'll get him back. Me and Fujin. She'll be back."

Renata didn't seem convinced by this argument. She only said, "Then we have to make sure you don't break before she comes. Before she and Garden come."

"I…was thinking," Raijin said, somewhat faint and unsure. "I was thinking that I could. I could plan this. I could be smart about it. Maybe." Pain radiated from every corner of his body. He ignored it. "…I'm not smart. But maybe."

Renata nodded. She looked relieved. She said. "They're coming for you soon. And they want to know—"

"Sorceresses," Raijin said. "They want to know about sorceresses. I could give them—"

"The new one," Renata urged. "That's the one they really care about."

Rinoa. Raijin had only really met her once, during that summer Seifer had spent on the Galbadian continent. She'd had a quick way of jostling Seifer, making him snap back, retort, until they fell to laughing and showing off with each other. Raijin had never seen Seifer like that before. Partnered. He'd also never seen Seifer so happy. Or, for that matter, Squall Leonhart, later on. Or for that matter even Fujin, who'd been recovering from some heartbreak that summer, and whom Rinoa Heartilly had listened to patiently, treated like a person, refused to be disarmed and put off by.

Rinoa was absolutely not the kind of person the DC generally liked. She was rich and spoiled, and she saw right through masks and then preferred to show you that she'd seen through them. She didn't let you stay comfortable. Her own insight sometimes meant more to her than your defense. They should have hated this. They hadn't. Rinoa had been selfish and prodding, to be sure. But she'd also left them each feeling, wonderfully, miraculously, like maybe the thing they were each trying so desperately to hide wasn't so bad after all. Because after she saw through you, she just kind of went with it. Sure, she kept poking. That was her way, to be a little annoying, a little needling. But for the most part she had her dreams – Timber, defeating Galbadia, and so on. And so if you were determined to be a little foolish, a little brutish, she'd make fun of you for it, but she'd understand. She understood other people as people with their own goals and needs. Of course she did: she had big goals and dreams herself.

Raijin had liked her. And it was really the DC's fault, in a way, that she was marked as she was. A sorceress now. So something in Raijin rebelled at betraying her. It was one thing to betray Garden, to use Galbadia, to attack old and cruel Esthar that had destroyed the plains, to screw over a bad system. The DC hated bad systems. With youthful cynicism, they'd spent hours between classes dissecting the evils of the world, politicians, institutional cruelty, and dreaming of how to destroy it all, consumed by romantic anarchy. You owed nothing to a system, and it was the highest kind of nobility to despise a sick one.

But Rinoa was a person. Raijin had a hard time betraying people. People meant something. Even the ones who could do nothing for you but annoy you. They had worth.

"No," Raijin told Renata tightly. "I—I won't. Say anything. Not about her."

But then what to say? Who to throw to the man in red while he waited for his rescue, while he tried to collect information on Seifer and this—this Gallery? Raijin didn't want to throw anyone in the man's sights. No one. He would've taken the hit himself, if it had been only his life on the line and not the whole DC's.

But he needed to buy time, to plan his escape so that he could find them again and make sure they were safe, Fujin and Seifer both. So he would need to become complacent, accepting, broken.

And the man in red wanted to break him not to get at him, but to procure - well. What else? A sorceress.

Raijin's least favorite sorceress was Ultimecia. But he knew very little about her; had never seen her, as Seifer had. And for all he knew it could be dangerous to share the knowledge of her. She was a kind of indiscernible evil that poisoned everything it touched. Something told him the man in red already had that in spades. He didn't need access to more.

Behind Renata, the door opened. Raijin's mind recoiled at it. But he shoved the fear away. He recalled, with perfect clarity, a moment in which he'd been just as terrified as he was right now. Deling City. The sickest system of all. All around them people celebrating it, a grand parade. And then: the sense that his world had been upended, because Seifer had been at the center of it. Seifer. Looking, to Raijin's eyes, for the first time golden, whole, not unfulfilled. He and Fujin hadn't known what to make of it. They'd stayed long enough to make sure he was alright. Then they'd returned to Garden, knowing they would be sanctioned or maybe expelled for attending the parade in the first place instead of coming right back as ordered, and they'd helped evacuate, because it was the least they could do for all those individual Garden people, those valuable personalities who meant so much to Raijin.

And then they'd abandoned the system. Inhuman, impersonal Garden meant nothing compared to human, brilliant, hungry Seifer. Nothing. Only of course they'd missed a huge hint, that day at the parade. Because Seifer hadn't been up there aline. There had been a false creature standing next to him. A mother who'd tossed her son up to Ultimecia's hands. The person who should have taken Seifer onto her knee and guided him, but who'd instead thrown on him rules and forms and psych evals and left him to his hunger.

Edea. The most untrue being Raijin could think of. The pang in his heart at the thought that he was tossing a person into the hands of the man in red was nothing compared to the mistrust and fear he felt when he thought of her, her black nails digging into Seifer's arm, her cold eye on all the DC as she'd made her orders known, the way her perfect mouth had opened to hurl abuse at a boy she should have cherished.

Raijin said, "Do you know? She wears a mask. Kramer. The sorceress Edea."

Renata stared at him worriedly. Turned to look over her shoulder at the man in red.

He only frowned. He said, "My friend, you're awake. And talking. That's wonderful. But we've been over this. Edea, Edea. It's boring, all this talk of Edea. Edea isn't a sorceress anymore, you know."

Raijin played dumb. He was good at dumb. He was dumb, a little. He said, "Isn't she?" with a kind of false wonder in his tone. And then he said, "But she can still take on the sorceress power, ya know? And…and she and Cid. They're in charge."

"Yes, yes, of Garden," said the man in red, waving a hand disinterestedly.

"Of the whole thing," Raijin told him. "The whole system. The SeeDs. No other sorceress ever had SeeDs."

Because that was the kicker, wasn't it? She hadn't just been fighting the SeeDs. She'd been one of their founders, too. Raijin didn't trust that. The official line was that she'd been a victim of Ultimecia's manipulations. But she'd done just as much wrong as Seifer, and then gotten off, tucked herself into the Garden fold, back into that sick system she'd created, and left her son – Raijin's friend – shadow-eyed and thin on a pier.

"You know," Raijin said, entirely honest. "I'm starting to think you were right about. Sometimes I think she set it up. Sometimes I think she knew what was going to happen, and she stacked the deck, so that Ultimecia would fall, but it would still be alright for her. She could still go back to her and Cid's army."

The man in red crouched down. He pushed back his cowl. His eyes were flat and strangely pale, oddly lifeless. His hair was long and dark, so that he seemed like a Knight of old, like an illustration in one of Seifer's books. He was very handsome, but there was a thuggish cruelty to the curl of his lip. It mocked Raijin. Reminded him of Seifer.

"The SeeDs – a kind of sunlight army," he said, thoughtfully as though he were putting something together. "You know," he continued. "I have a friend who's rather interested in news of Edea, come to think of it. She hasn't heard from her in an age." He put a friendly hand on Raijin's cheek. Intimate.

Raijin bit down on his bile.

* * *

Squall was still in Seifer's past, all through that whole night. But at first it wasn't so bad. He was beginning to think that Seifer had a future.

This made him oddly pleased. It touched some human part of him, some part Rinoa had prodded at until it had woken up and responded. He was a still rival to Seifer in the worst ways, still worried that Seifer was leaping ahead, still grateful that he'd come out right and won Rinoa while Seifer had gone wrong and lost – well. Everything. But he also understood Seifer, and wanted Seifer back. This possessiveness was stronger than his competitive pride, it turned out. No one could have been more surprised by this than Squall.

It was night, here in Seifer's past. The place outside the windows was dark. Squall couldn't see where they were. Seifer's prison was lit by weird green lights in odd corners, never quite illuminating what Squall wanted to see, forever leaving all but Renata's tall form, two steps ahead, in shadow. She led Seifer out through back stairs, past empty rooms shrouded in darkness, into strange elevators where the grilles creaked ominously shut and the buttons were marked by weird symbols. It seemed to Squall that they were in a castle of eleven thousand rooms, a place that never ended.

Until they came out in an unfamiliar alley.

The prison wasn't a desert prison. It was in a city; that much was clear. The buildings on either side of it were cloaked in darkness and they faded away quickly as Renata and Seifer passed them. But Squall caught sight of – because Seifer caught sight of – more strange carvings. Horrible grimacing faces, odd little figures carrying hooks and knives and staves, scenes of battle, and fruits and animals he couldn't identify. Also geometric tiled walls that made him dizzy, and doorways where black smoke coalesced, and the clanging sounds of metal everywhere. Everywhere. This place was a hive of activity; there were persons bustling by, dressed almost in the style of the Estharians, but no one spoke to him and they rarely spoke to each other; instead there were the crackles of fires being lit just out of sight, and the clash of weapons, and the buzz of saws. The entire place had a strange light, sickly and yellow and artificial.

Where were they?

_Finally_, Seifer thought. _I'm here_.

Yes. But where?

"The trick is to get you out," Renata was saying. She had, along the way, devised a plan. Seifer didn't resemble the people of this place. Not in dress. Not in features. So she had a somewhat weak grip on his gunblade, and he walked in front of her with his hands clasped behind him, as though she were a jailer prodding him along and he were a handcuffed foreign captive. But Squall thought that Seifer made a poor kind of fake-prisoner. Seifer didn't do meek, subdued, or cowed very well - even at his worst, he'd worn desperation with a degree of put-on grandeur that had seemed pitiful at the time, but that he'd seemed unable to shake free of. That last-ditch pride was just him. So anyone who looked at him would have been hard-pressed to conclude that Renata had cowed him in any way. But they had darkness on their side, and in that darkness it seemed that no one looked too closely at them. They progressed around the edge of a building, its open door churning out black smoke, and met—

A wall? A solid, tiled wall, patterned with brilliant colors. Going far in every direction, and when Seifer craned his head to look, they could see that it went up, up, up, up, curving ever-so-slightly in a concave fashion, until it vanished into blackness.

As though the city were ensconced by it.

Seriously. Where were they? Renata nudged Seifer gently to the right, down a set of steps, and then they were in a tunnel beneath the city, also tiled in every direction, curving up over their heads, trapping them underneath. There were what looked like advertisements set into the walls, strange pictures of people laughing just a little too cheerfully, of dark pools in tranquil caves that were just a little too perfect.

The writing on the ads wasn't anything Squall could read. This worried him. He thought he could remember what language that was, even if it wasn't a language he could decipher. But when he reached for the memory it just wasn't there.

Seifer could read it. That was the odd thing. _See The Stalagmites of Sodor!_ and _Lukos Wrigby, The Gladiator of The Century, Faces Off Against Fifty Leowyrms! Match This Hynesday At Five!_ The ads came to Squall translated, filtered through Seifer's brain. And soon enough Squall was deciphering them too, almost with borrowed knowledge, and it came as some shock when he saw smaller notices tacked up here and there on the tiled walls, in Principle, with proclamations like:

**Traveling Without Your Identification Is Frowned Upon** and  
**Deluxe Cars Forbidden To Skins**.

People hurried past them, and soon enough they were lost in a crowd. And then in the distance Squall heard – because Seifer heard – the shrieks of more metal and the click-clack of rails.

A subway. They were in a subway. But—but that was ludicrous. No city had an underground subway. Not anymore, anyway. Squall tried to recall when he'd learned about one that did (he was sure he'd learned about it), but the memory wouldn't come to him. Was it Deling City? Had they had one, but shut it down, because of totalitarian activity? No, that wasn't it. Timber, maybe. City of trains. Or maybe—

_Now we're underneath the Underworld_, Seifer thought, with a kind of satisfied wonder.

What?

"We have to take the regulars," Renata was saying, now that they were in that special kind of crowd: a group of people so frenetic and so large that there was no chance of anyone paying them the slightest attention. She'd dropped the jailer act and now held the gunblade limply, like she didn't know what to do with it and didn't want to accidentally slice anybody open. Seifer took the dilemma out of her hands. He took his blade back with ease. Renata blinked at him, but quickly recovered. She said, "Look, we can only get one of you out at a time."

"Raijin first," Seifer said, without even thinking about it.

"What? No! Not him. You. Do you understand what they're going to do to you? They're taking you to the—"

Again the word. The sorceress word. The one they didn't know. Though Seifer had abandoned the thought of Renata being a sorceress some time ago. He simply seemed to know in his bones that she wasn't, and, oddly, Squall understood that. There was a spark of strength to Rinoa, and a heavy undercurrent of power that had blanketed Ultimecia, that any Knight felt right away. But Renata didn't have that strength or power. She was like normal people were: blank, nothing reaching out to tug at the mind.

She repeated the word, urgently this time. She brought a slim dark hand up and hit Seifer's chest with it, as if to impress upon him the seriousness of the situation. He simply looked at her, unimpressed and somewhat annoyed, because this was Seifer she was dealing with, and if all it took to knock sense him was a hit to the chest, then Squall would have accomplished it years ago.

Seifer shrugged off his annoyance. He said, "Repeat that."

"The Gallery," said Renata.

Or, rather, she didn't say the Gallery. She said the same word – the sorceress word. And something clicked in Seifer's brain, the way it had with the advertisements. And so then suddenly he knew what she was saying. And Squall knew, as well, before Seifer repeated the word to her back in Principle, to be sure.

"I guess that is the translation," she said, furrowing her brow. "But it doesn't matter."

Only Seifer thought it did. He was searching his mind now for why, there on the crowded train platform, as at home in this odd place as he ought to have been (but never quite was) at Garden. And Renata had to grab his sleeve and pull him onto the train when it came, so bothered was he by the fact that he couldn't access the memory. _Gallery. The Gallery. Dammit, I saw it! I know I did._

Squall was just as confused. Did he mean his Gallery of Failed Knights?

The strange thing was, it was almost like by thinking this he restored the memory to Seifer. Seifer, who didn't even know Squall was there (how could he?) hit on the thought right away, plucked it from Squall's mental grasp, held it alight, and examined it, even as Renata dragged him along and shoved him in a corner of the train.

"Are you listening?" she hissed.

The trains had black cars and putrid green ones. The black stayed closed. The green opened. Their insides had hard metal seats that were all taken and too many people piled in all around them, so that it was oppressively hot. With all the hauteur of an old Dolletian nobleman, Seifer shrugged out of his heavy coat. Renata took it confusedly, tricked into playing his steward. Seifer waved at her again, as though to suggest he might be open to hearing what she had to say.

But he had bigger things on his mind.

Seifer had been time compressed along with the rest of them. It hit Squall as something of a surprise, but then he berated himself for it. Of course Seifer had been time compressed. Ultimecia's spell had had no real rhyme or reason to it. They still weren't sure how many people had been affected when she'd compressed time. Most, among them Laguna and Ellone and others staying safe in Esthar, equipped with Dr. Odine's knowledge and his gadgets, and fully aware of what had been happening, had been fine. They suffered some nausea in the moment Ultimecia had fucked the timeline, some sense that the universe had gone off its tilt. They'd seen faraway places, long-gone people, but nothing that could hurt them. They all knew to remain firm, strong, and keep to good memories, fortifying memories, so that they could draw strength from their past and their loved ones and pull themselves back into their present.

But then there had been others. A family in Dollet reported horrible visions, images of soldiers raiding houses, ash falling from the sky. The people of Winhill claimed ghosts had begun rising from the floorboards – some of those ghosts their own, come back to warn them with cryptic rolling eyes and horrible grimaces and flowers where their eyes should be. In Fisherman's Horizon, more than one person had looked outside their window and seen not the ocean, but the vast Estharian plains. A few had decided to go riding on them, as if in a daze, imagining up beckoning chocobos just beyond the docks, and thankfully most of the fishermen were also good swimmers or else after Time Compression there would have been a whole lot of sudden drownings to account for. Trabia Garden had seemed healthy and whole again, its modest towers shining on its once-again green fields, for a single instant, for all the survivors, with the dead peeking from the windows, opening their mouths to greet their friends and letting out only black smoke instead. And no Trabian could say whether it had been Time Compression at all, or just a mass hallucination.

If all those people had been affected, then it stood to reason that Seifer, who'd been so intimately connected to the one responsible, should have suffered too.

Squall had ultimately fallen out of Ultimecia's castle and into his own past. Seifer had made the opposite journey. Time Compression had dragged him forwards, into the castle, running parallel to the rest of the orphanage gang. While they'd defeated sorceresses and monsters and gazed with horrified wonder at the sheer empty creepiness of the place, Seifer had found the castle a different experience entirely.

In one room there were scores of people chattering. Their faces were small bits of blurred colors and shapes, like sudden static on an old television. But there they were all the same, glitches in old-fashioned dress, beckoning to Seifer. _Sieur, Sieur_. He'd passed in through double-doors at one end, then out through the double-doors at the other, only to come back through the same room, in a different time, now all the windows fitted with bars and hung with green army fabric, rows of plastic-topped tables manned by rows of dark, desperate looking men, all working under the watchful eye of a guard, who beckoned Seifer forward. There was a woman on his arm, pale and small with bright hair – sometimes gold, sometimes red. _Sir, Sir_. Out again through the double doors.

And so on, an infinite loop, always something new each time, until he thought he would go crazy with it. And just when he'd thought that, there he was in a new room, a new grand hall. And made to repeat the process over. At times, it was Edea who was with him, the edges of her form blurry and indistinct, sobbing for some reason. At others it was Cid, first smiling indulgently down at him, then morphing into a taller, more threatening form, calling him worthless, calling him dishonorable, a coward – the GF Odin, who he'd struck down.

Time Compression made no sense. Dreams and reason and self were supposed to fall away. You were supposed to become unaware of yourself, of where you began and the world ended. That was what had happened to Squall. That was why he'd needed Rinoa.

Not so for Seifer, who stalked through life full of unfilled cravings, famished for something no one could figure out. Time Compression only crystallized that ache inside him, that yearning. It had grown stronger and stronger and harder to resist all while he'd been serving Ultimecia. Then she'd forced all the world into a single instant. And in that instant Seifer was hungrier than ever before, with less chance of ever seeing himself sated. Simply walking in an endless loop, desperate, ravenous and empty.

And so at one point he stopped. He ignored the forms all around him; the strange woman, patting his arm; a dark girl just ahead; Cid Kramer; his posse, all comingled with the faces of dead soldiers he recalled from his SeeD tests. He brought up a hand, and could see the odd transparency to his fingers, his skin gone paper white and stretched over each bone segment. He had the odd sense that he'd overdosed on his sorceress's magic, and now all his body was in the process of dying, beginning to match his ragged coat, falling away, and in time he'd become only the thing that he was inside, the unfulfilled thing, himself without a mask, as his outer form left him and rotted away.

Seifer saw a glimpse of himself for the first time. Cruel and careless. A junkie for his dream. A starving thing. Someone who'd gone after his desires to the fullest, devoured and devoured, and come out with—what?

Nothing. A loss of control. He'd ceded himself to Ultimecia, wholly and completely, convinced he was in charge the whole time. And in fact he'd only lost those parts of himself that were his protection against the world: his sense, his reason, his hope of heroism and worth, his identity. He'd lost who he wanted to be. And the really horrible thing was: it wasn't his sorceress who had turned him inside out like this. She'd done something worse. She'd convinced him to turn _himself_ inside out.

She appeared before him. It was her; he knew it was, even as the edges of her form shifted, as she grew white wings like Rinoa, as she shrunk and seemed like any Deling City girl in fancy clothes, as her eyes went as perfectly warmly gold as Matron's. She said, staring at him, "So you're going to be my Knight?"

"No," he'd said. "No, no, no, no. no."

"It's already happened," she reflected, her form still indistinct. She became Rinoa, for a second, in Adel's arms. It hit some chord inside him, and then he felt like the chord was ripped out, and like his body was fading away even faster. "It's already happened, and it's happening, and it will continue to happen. Every moment in the timeline is the same. That means it can't be changed. It happens now. It will happen over and over and over again. You will always be this, in the end."

She gestured at him. He looked down. His feet, legs, hips, chest – formless. Not strong, not heroic, not likely to go down in history. Just nothing. He turned and ran. Around him, the rooms looped and looped. They changed slightly. But in the end they were all the same, and each one more senseless and worthless than the last.

Like him.

Squall had had Rinoa to pull him out of Time Compression. Seifer had no one, or at least at first he didn't. When help came, it was as horrible and confusing as anything else here – simply a hand, drawing him not out of the room, but _down_.

Strange. He'd never thought to head down. For one thing, he hadn't been thinking according to the absurd rules of Time Compression. So he'd assumed that the floor would be in the way.

"Who are you?" he demanded of his rescuer.

"A guardian," they said, in a voice that sounded flimsy, far-off, and hard to make out.

They dropped him in the Gallery. He didn't know how he knew it was called that; maybe his rescuer had whispered it to him. But it was a Gallery. An enormous hall, with beautiful metal walls with blue whorls and silver script on them like the lecture halls at Garden, only here there were assembled not desks and computer consoles and a bored teenage instructor, but Knights. Only Knights.

All the Knights. Many Seifer knew, for Seifer knew more about knights than maybe any other person in the world. And many he didn't know. They were still, peaceful, and calm, like statues, except that when he touched them their eyes fluttered, they cocked their heads, they responded to him. He was fast-fading at this point, but these long-dead figures were mockingly whole compared to him: in fact, they practically shone with vitality. He wandered among them for some time. Daemon Carteret was dark-skinned, not Dolletian-seeming at all – who knew? But it had to be him, for there was his famed scythe and he wore the colors of Domitia herself.

Ignotus Romulus and Iseult Neve, enemies until they'd drawn their last breaths, sat facing each other. She wore the blue sari of old Balamb, and her legendary sword gleamed wickedly at Ignotus's throat. He, for his part, had that red painted face, his trademark mourning band painted across his throat.

Each one looked savage, unpredictable, powerful, healthy, and alive. All alive. As though the world would never permit them to die. Never. They were too valuable. Even the ones Seifer didn't know – men with mechanical steeds and wickedly sharp teeth, women with claws for fingernails and blood marring their soldiers' tunics – imparted a sense of being useful, being worthy, being unafraid.

This was the hall, and these the people, that had long haunted and populated and fed Seifer's hungriest dreams.

"Self-control isn't an issue for them," noted his rescuer. "They're beyond that. They were successful Knights."

"It is for me," Seifer admitted bitterly, speaking over a rage and despair that seemed to mount in his fast-disappearing throat. "I – I—"

"Lost control. Fucked up," his rescuer said. They sounded like Cid. The same subtle recrimination, the same patronizing pity. "Come here. Look at this."

And his rescuer led him to the back. The figures became more powerful, more inhuman, their clothing older and more curious. Until at last they found one spot, one corner, that was –

Empty. Just an empty chair, forlorn and abandoned. One imperfect, lone spot in the gallery of heroes.

"You've demolished the one who should have gone here," Seifer's self-appointed guardian told him. "You, uncaring, and heedless, have made piecemeal out of the latest Knight to bear the name. What's a Knight worth, when he works only for evil? Now the dignified, worthy, noble creature that belonged here can never take his rightful place. He no longer exists."

He? Who was he?

"Dishonorable wretch that _you_ have become—" clarified the guardian.

"No!" Seifer cried. "I'm not! This is my place! I belong here. I know I do. With the Knights. Gimme a chance—"

"When has anyone ever given you a chance?" snapped his rescuer. "No one does. You aren't worth it. Your chances you have to take. So if you want to take your place here, then take it. Find the Gallery."

"Where?" Seifer shouted, as best he could. He felt as though his own voice were growing tinny and flimsy and far away, as though soon he would fade into nothing and then he'd never be able to take anything at all, let alone a second chance.

"Down," snorted his rescuer. "Down, down, down."

And then Seifer had felt a jerk on the insubstantial parts of him that still existed, and a film came over him like his eyes had been closed the whole time and he'd never realized. He opened them. Fujin and Raijin were staring down at him, concerned. They looked grubby, unhappy, and worried, but whole. They were, he thought wildly, though he'd never considered it before, very valuable people. Very good people. He wasn't. He'd need to snatch goodness and value and worth back.

"What's down?" he asked, apropos of nothing.

Fujin looked at Raijin. Raijin looked at Fujin.

"Is that, like, Galbadian soldier slang?" Raijin asked. "What's down instead of what's up? Makes sense. They're backwards, ya know? Nothing's down. Well. Okay. Maybe something has gone down. We think Squall won."

"TAKING YOU HOME," said Fujin.

Seifer barely processed this. He'd seen his true self. He'd seen his failure. But then, as was customary for him, he'd also seen a way out.

"I'm not going back to Garden," he muttered. "I need to go down."

"NOT GARDEN," Fujin said. "OUR HOME."

"Yeah," Raijin said uncomfortably. "We'll rest up at the Balamb hotel and then we're taking you to FH, ya know? You need a breather. You've already hit rock bottom, Seifer. You've gone as far down as you can go, ya know?"

* * *

There was a small television in one of the waiting rooms in the Deling City train station, and on it Selphie got to see her boyfriend also hit rock bottom. It was seven months after Seifer had made the trip there.

Irvine's voyage, unfairly enough, involved much more handcuffing. Not to mention the indignity of a sagging middle-aged prison guard giving Irvine a fatherly pat as he secured him for the transport back to Garden. Talking heads made sure to mention Irvine's sexual proclivities as much as possible and to speculate about the kinds of behavior Garden might condone. One commended General Caraway for his brilliant arrest.

Rinoa tapped her fingers on her red book. Stuffed it into her bag. Tapped her fingers on her chair arms. Someone on the television called Caraway a great protector of Galbadian moral values. Rinoa's tapping ceased. The chair next to her very quietly set itself on fire.

Selphie put it out. It was just as well that they were the only two in this particular waiting room. Even if Rinoa hadn't been feeling pyromaniacal, Selphie would still be feeling violent and unsettled. It was unpleasant enough to see Irvine slandered. When that happened, she couldn't help but identify in him not the tall, exciting, languid creature she was dating, but the sweet, unsure boy she'd known and defended to the rest of the orphanage gang ruffians. Her protective streak reared its head. If there had been Galbadians in here with the girls, offering their uninformed perspectives and jeering and discussing Irvine like he was something meant for communal dissection, Selphie might have been forced to do something very unwise.

As it was, she'd already let her inner aggressiveness get the better of her and now it reared its head on the television.

"I, personally, just don't think Garden should be sending violent and immoral people into our city," Tulip Ruta was saying. She was sitting in an girlishly-decorated room. She was now in a schoolgirl skirt and demure cardigan. She wore girlish pink ribbons in her nut-brown pigtails. "Personally, I think our nightclubs are going to attract people like Kinneas. But ever since Garden came public about SeeDs and what SeeDs are for, I just personally think they should be focusing on containing sorceresses. I don't appreciate being threatened just when I'm going out for a drink."

No mention was made of the fact that Caraway's goons had been the first ones to threaten her. It simply seemed as though Tulip (Official's Daughter, age 18, said the caption underneath her) had stumbled unwittingly into a small nighttime café only to be menaced by Irvine. And actually, from how this was being spun, it looked like Caraway had sprung into action and called a raid on the club purely to catch lascivious SeeDs lurking in the shadows. Whatever the General had actually been doing? Sneaking, commandeering, destroying, politicking, whatever it was they did, from their lofty General positions? Instead of playing morality police? No one bothered to even broach the topic.

"This is unbelievable!" Selphie said, furious. Angelo, under the seat, whined in agreement.

For one thing, even though it would have looked even worse for Garden to have two SeeDs caught out instead of one, she almost wished they'd mention her involvement. But no one did. If all they wanted to do was discredit Kramer's kids, then Irvine made a sufficient scapegoat. After a night in lockup, he was stubbly and unkempt. He had a kind of dangerous, long-haired, lower-class youth look to him, all bruised lip and too-tight trousers. His weapons and GFs – Exeter, short-range pistol, the ring that served as Siren's manifest – were stripped from him publicly, laid out to be consumed by the cameras, then packed away before all the watchful eyes of the world to be shipped back a Garden, as a sign of the Deling Interim Commissioner's good faith and willingness to abide by the agreement with Xu.

But the good faith thing didn't line up. There were no special rules that said SeeDs couldn't frequent the city's more questionable establishments. Just sections of their ceasefire that said they had to announce themselves and their business to appropriate authorities before coming within Deling limits. And that was just it. They had announced their business. No, not formally. Just to the freakin' General, and only when caught out. But they'd still announced it, which fulfilled the very hazy terms of their pact with Galbadia. And if Selphie knew Xu, then the Headmistress had sent out some misleading note to the Deling politicos as a CYA, since Xu was the queen of the CYA, and it would have been full of little technical points meant to clear her people in case of situations like this: _I remind you that our mutual nonaggression is paramount in such unstable times_ and _per the terms of our last agreement, SeeDs may not be limited in movement, their decisions must be given weight, and they are to be referred to Garden in matters of discipline._

Plus, the overarching detail that every nation on earth publicly bowed to was: SeeD existed to protect the sorceress and protect others from her. And Selphie and Irvine had technically abided by that in following her to Deling. Even if she hadn't been anywhere near them at the time of Irvine's arrest.

"Was the sorceress there?" a reporter asked Tulip Ruta.

Tulip had now acquired a fluffy white kitten. She petted it sweetly. She said, "I didn't personally see her anywhere. I grew up with her, so I know her—"

Next to Selphie, Rinoa gave a very un-Rinoa-like snort. She'd been very quiet since they'd left Caraway's mansion, completely innocuous barring some odd behavior like the kindling of municipal property, but this seemed to insult her in some special indefinable way that required acknowledgment.

"And, personally, even though she's a sorceress now because personally she wasn't the most sensible person, I don't think she would ever end up in a place like that, and I'm shocked that these are the kinds of people she hangs out with, but then just, like, speaking personally? She really was not the kind of girl to make an effort socially—"

"Balls," Selphie told Rinoa, eager to defend her even to a total imbecile on the television.

Rinoa seemed to be only half-listening, still not quite herself. She only shook her head and didn't otherwise respond.

"—and it's really sad that SeeD are the only people who will put up with her. But no, I didn't see her. I think personally her little bodyguard was only there for some fun."

Tulip's cat sniffed. Tulip sniffed as well. The reporter sniffed. There was a regular sniff-circle going on, designed to show how very irresponsible and disgusting and skeevy Irvine was.

"I am going to end that girl," Selphie told Rinoa. "_Personally_."

Rinoa still didn't respond. The reporters switched to discussing Garden over-involvement in Esthar and how Garden clearly favored the wicked East because of Squall Leonhart's strong patrilineal ties to the region. This was beyond silly, because Squall's father, the president of Esthar, was Galbadian by birth, even if that wasn't common knowledge. But then there was a bigger game being played here. That seemed to be what Caraway and Deling City did. Played political games. Even if some people in the Deling City inner circle knew about Laguna and his background, it was that unlikely they'd reveal it to anyone, since it benefitted them not at all to say that a Galbadian foot soldier had defected, hit the Timberi journalism racket, and eventually revolutionized Esthar for the better.

Just like, for some reason, it didn't benefit them to mention that Selphie had been present in the club. Or to reveal the false cover story Missy had given Tulip. Or the false cover story that Selphie and Irvine had given Caraway. Admittedly, piecing together all the lies Selphie and Irvine had operated under had to be confusing. But that didn't change the facts. Deling City probably had both cover stories in their possession right now, and they'd seen that Irvine junctioned Siren, with her magic-dampening abilities, so they might even know that SeeD was concerned about magic use. And they knew about the cadet at G-Garden who'd piqued SeeD's interest, and they probably suspected that Garden was poking around forsome reason that Garden didn't want to totally disclose.

But they were playing all these cards close.

It made no sense. It couldn't have hurt Deling City to come out and say that Selphie had been there too, or that the SeeDs had come in under the pretense of ferreting out a threat to the sorceress. If anything, insinuating that Selphie and Irvine had lied about that, or that they had only been trying to sneak into the seedier kind of club while neglecting their duties, would have done twice as much to damage Garden's reputation as a sniffy Tulip Ruta could do.

But Deling City wasn't going there with the story. Why not?

Maybe because it would cut too close to something they wanted to hide.

"They're in on it," Selphie realized. "Maybe they knew from jump why we were here. And so they orchestrated—"

Rinoa made a swift cutting motion with her hand in Selphie's direction. Rinoa wasn't even looking at Selphie, and in fact her other hand was absorbed in twisting something in her lap, so it seemed for all the world like she was only vaguely aware she'd done it. But the end of Selphie's sentence vanished. It had been there. Selphie had said it. Only now she hadn't. Rinoa had plucked it out of existence.

Selphie stared at her, a little terrified, mostly concerned. Rinoa didn't do stuff like this. Rinoa wasn't casual and comfortable with her powers. She attacked them like a student desperate not to flunk a very unpleasant research project. She read, and learned, and compiled all she could on them. And then she proceeded to use them as little as possible, because all the information made her vaguely upset, as though she didn't really want to have to be learning it.

"Rinoa, I have to ask again. Are you ok—" Selphie began.

The whistle of the approaching train sounded in the distance. Rinoa was out of her seat in a flash, faster than Selphie had ever seen her move. She grabbed Selphie by the arm with a grip that was leagues beyond Rinoa's usual level of strength.

"Kalm down," she told Selphie, even though Selphie was fairly sure she'd actually been doing a stellar job of staying calm. "We will talk at Garden."

She tugged Selphie out of the waiting room, into the greater station Hall, and down the escalator to where the latest express to Balamb had pulled in. No one asked them for their tickets as they got on because heads simply looked away as Rinoa passed, and in her haste to get on the train Rinoa herself seemed not to notice this. Angelo whined at their heels until they reached their designated compartment, where she vanished under the seats. Rinoa manhandled Selphie inside, then took a seat at the window and propped her elbow on the sill, leaning into her hand. Her brow furrowed. Her face changed subtly, going from deliberation to confusion to snappish annoyance, like she was dealing with things Selphie couldn't see or understand, operating on another level entirely, the way she was when she had to talk to her father.

Actually, it looked a lot like Rinoa was having a conversation. Only not with Caraway this time. With unseen voices in her head.

Selphie had been calm (if angry and a little scared) before. But now she was outright freaking out. She crept up to Rinoa as the train started up. Rinoa seemed not to notice the train, so hopefully she wouldn't notice Selphie. And so Selphie could try and coax her out of…whatever this was, and, barring that, she could cast sleep or something, and then at Garden they could figure out what was going on with her, why her powers seemed to have short-circuited her brain.

Rinoa reached out a hand before Selphie got close and grabbed Selphie's wrist.

Crap.

"It kan wait, Selphie," she said calmly. Then she did something weird. She took the things she'd been fiddling with in her other hand and dropped them into Selphie's hands instead. Her Manifests. The bangle that tied her to Leviathan. Alexander's simple white seal. These things weren't necessary for Rinoa to use magic, of course. She wasn't dependent on GFs; she was a sorceress and had her own power, not to mention that their encounter with Adel had shown that she was as good as a GF herself and could be junctioned like one, given someone sick enough and powerful enough to try.

But it was still bizarre that she would give up her Manifests. It was a point of pride for her boyfriend that no one would dare challenge her right to use Garden GFs, and for that matter a point of pride among her friends, as well. They didn't technically consider the GFs their own personal magic store, of course not. That was highly discouraged. GFs were Garden property, and offered to the SeeDs on largesse. All of them had acknowledged that and had delivered up many a GF for use monster-hunting in Esthar. Their group wasn't greedy.

But still. GFs meant power. They were the edge in just about any battle. When you got really good, something in you seemed to call to the more dangerous monsters out there. Moon monsters sniffed out strength and wanted to destroy it; that was the impulse that propelled them down to earth via the crystal pillar, according to Odine. The pillar gave off a kind of attraction to them, a hidden strength; it was some kind of beacon for stray magic. And the more powerful you were, the more you were basically indistinguishable from the pillar for them, and the more you could expect the really tough ones to come after you. But GFs still tore through them with alarming effectiveness. So. No one really wanted to give them up. Even Irvy, who had a complex relationship with them and who Selphie suspected really hated them, wouldn't have handed Siren over unless it had come to—well. Arrest.

"Sooo, am I just holding onto these for you, or…?" Selphie said, disconcerted.

Rinoa waved her away and went back to making faces at the window.

Alright. Casting sleep it was. Not because Rinoa was doing anything dangerous right now, unless you counted her sudden death grip. But because all the pieces – her weird quiet, her speech patterns, her unacknowledged magic use – added up to potential danger. And Selphie really didn't want anything else to go wrong before she regrouped with her friends and figured out what to do about it. If it turned out that Rinoa's powers were finally going haywire and she was a threat to the world, then probably it was better to knock the girl out before Xu figured it out. Because then they'd not only have to drag her to Esthar to fix her (again), but they'd have to fight Garden while doing it. And Selphie knew for a fact that Xu was a creative thinker and had already lined up a whole bunch of plans in case it came to that, and she really didn't want to test their luck or Rinoa's by tipping Xu off and seeing those plans fall into motion.

Selphie slipped the bangle on. Affixed the seal to her blouse. Took a second to acquaint herself with the two new personalities in her head, subtly taking stock of their abilities and nudging them towards the kinds of battle tactics she preferred, the way she'd been taught at T-Garden. Then she raised one hand behind her back and prepared to cast on her friend, feeling slightly traitorous all the while.

Selphie's phone rang.

Rinoa jolted up and stared straight at her, spooked by the noise. Dammit. There went Selphie's chance to cast sleep surreptitiously. The phone rang again. And again and again and again. Selphie had given up and answered it by the time Rinoa had turned back and resumed her k-heavy discussion with the voices in her head. Which couldn't even be her GFs at this point, since she'd given up her GFs.

"I need your help," Quistis said, as soon as Selphie hit the button to take the call. "I've lost control of my team!"

Well, that made two of them.

Quistis outlined a nightmare scenario, alone and trapped between Cid's skeevy secrets and two screaming teammates who wouldn't wake up. Selphie genuinely felt sorry for her, even if her own situation was just as dire and twice as infuriating. And even if she couldn't figure out why Quistis was calling her. Sure, Xu was busy and it was, like, four am where Quistis was, and Quistis was alone, and possibly Zell was wetting the bed? Maybe? It didn't sound like Zell. It did sound like maybe Quistis was just afraid of that happening. But Selphie was several thousand miles away and no expert on falling asleep and not waking u—

Or. Actually.

"Ellone?" Selphie offered.

"What?" said Quistis.

Keeping a careful eye on Rinoa, Selphie crossed to the seat opposite her and sat down, then unpacked what she knew about sleeping creepy. Ellone. Ellone did that. That was the Ellone thing.

"Okay, so, like, it happened to you too, right? You remember. We'd fall asleep, only not really," Selphie said. "We'd be in the middle of a mission –"

Quistis said, "You mean when she sent us to Laguna's time? We never started screaming that I can recall, and—"

"No, but then you don't know where Squall and Zell are," Selphie said. "You don't know who they are. I mean, you were Ward one time, right? He's not exactly a screamer. And then Kiros. I was Kiros once too. Do you want to know who the suavest, least panicky person in the world is? Kiros. Kiros could suffer through, I don't know, one of those world-ending apocalypses in those books Nida reads, and be fine. And mostly he was just running around making sure Laguna didn't waste all their money anyway."

"So you think Ellone's stuck them in the mind of someone suffering? Sent them back to face some kind of trauma? Why would she do that?"

"Why would she pick you and me for Kiros or Ward at different times?" Selphie said, shrugging. "Ellone works in mysterious ways."

"And it wasn't like she thought about it then. Maybe she's not thinking about the consequences now, either," Quistis added, a touch of condemnation in her voice. "She took us out of commission during a pretty serious time."

Ellone had basically been putting them in danger in order to unravel and change her own past. Which wasn't so great. She was a sweet girl, she'd been nice to them in Esthar, and Selphie vaguely remembered her as being fun to play with as a kid. But whoa: did that chick have problems. Selphie wasn't going to hold it against her: the actual experience of living as Ward Zabac and Kiros Seagill had been kind of fun. But getting there had had its rough points.

"I wonder if she knows how rat fink it was of her," Selphie mused. "Remember? I liked it, but it didn't feel nice at first. Like, like that moment when you're exhausted. Only I wasn't feeling tired until she messed with me. There I was, happy and perky—"

"Yeah," Quistis said. "She messed with our heads. Induced sleep. But Zell and Squall just fell asleep on their own."

"Well, maybe that just means she wouldn't have had to induce it," Selphie said. "They were already tired, so she didn't have to do it for them. Weird, how being tired is a part of it."

"So tired you don't really feel like you," Quistis said.

"Right," Selphie agreed, remembering. "And that other feeling! Remember? Not exactly dizziness. More like everything you should be feeling around you hits you through a filter, and you can't really control your body because it's suddenly so heavy. You're all twitchy. It's like it's not even your body anymore, and—"

Selphie stopped. Rinoa was looking at her. Very intently. With that same indefinable witchiness to her, that disconcerting element lurking in her eyes.

"Selphie?" Quistis said.

"Keep going," Rinoa said calmly.

Selphie had no idea why Rinoa should be so suddenly devoted to this particular topic, which she'd already heard about on many times, and after refusing to speak about anything for so long. But her instincts told her to do as her sorceress friend said, because her sorceress friend was unpredictable and creepy and maybe more than a little dangerous right now. So Selphie added, "You feel like, like you could almost be outside your body for a sec. Ellone whammies you with that. And then she takes you away. You've fallen asleep, you think, but really what happens is you're suddenly inside a dream. But the dream is—"

"Somebody else's life," Rinoa murmured. "You're connected to them."

She'd been interested in their Ellone travels before, but she'd never looked quite so satisfied or intense about it. Polite and engaged was Rinoa's thing. Not crazy-eyed like this.

"Is that Rinoa?" Quistis said. "Don't tell her about Squall! I mean. Well. Okay. Maybe do, since he is her boyfriend. But she's just going to worry, and she's not a SeeD."

"Don't tell me what about Squall?" Rinoa said suspiciously, evidently equipped with super-sorceress hearing. And even though Quistis was cursing on the other end of the line, Selphie was a little relieved. Because when she heard 'Squall,' something in Rinoa's eyes seemed to snap back into focus. She became a little bit more herself again. Selphie didn't know how she knew this; she just did. It was in how suddenly it was nice to have Rinoa looking at her again. It wasn't chilling.

Rinoa got up and held out her hand for the phone. Selphie debated whether to give it to her. Rinoa right now was better than she'd been all evening; hearing about Squall might stabilize her. But the news about Squall wasn't exactly good, and it wasn't like she and Rinoa could do anything about it just then, and what if the upset sent her off the deep end? Selphie was SeeD-trained to handle terrible scenarios like theirs and Quistis's without letting dire developments cloud her judgment. Rinoa, while a real champ about keeping up with SeeD most of the time, wasn't so trained.

Rinoa plucked the decision out of Selphie's hands. Because, quick as a flash, she also plucked up the phone. She put it to her ear and said, "Tell me."

Selphie watched uneasily as Quistis's barely-audible patter filled Rinoa in. Rinoa's face became stony. Oddly, there wasn't much change to her beyond that. She simply took the news in a little grimly. And all she said was, "Did you cast silence? And make sure they're not moving around too much so they don't hurt themselves?"

Both solid suggestions, SeeD-worthy suggestions, and apparently also suggestions that had occurred to Quistis.

"Good," Rinoa said. "Then the next step is to get them back to Garden. Do that. We'll meet you there." She was being unusually brusque, for Rinoa, but her tone wasn't unkind. She handed the phone back to Selphie. Selphie was fairly sure she wouldn't be able to improve on Rinoa's advice, so all she said was, "Then we can hunt down Ellone and figure out why this is happening. It's, like, going on the middle of the night in Esthar and she's a pain to get in touch with, but once we're back at Garden we can put an official stamp on it and she'll have to talk to us!"

Squall, had he been conscious, would probably not have approved of handling Sis in this manner. Like she was just some stranger, like she wasn't Sis anymore. But that was the thing. As far as Selphie knew, she was some stranger at this point. Ellone had some contact with Squall, and was always welcoming when the group dropped by Esthar. But she had effectively cut ties with Garden, and besides this she'd never fully explained or even apologized about the whole sending them back in time thing.

Plus, given what she was apparently doing to Squall and Zell, this time she'd really overstepped.

"That's one option," Rinoa said, sitting calmly back down. "We can brainstorm more and vote on it when the rest of us are all together. Me, you, Quistis, Irvine."

And that was her final word. She was silent and focused on something all the way to Garden, though weirdly twitchy about noises and so on her guard every time Selphie tried to cast anything that after a while Selphie just gave up. Rinoa seemed more in control of her magic after touching base with Quistis, so that was good. She didn't force the crowds of Balamb to part when they arrived. Of course, that was probably because there were no crowds in Balamb. Balamb had a population of like a hundred people. Rinoa then glided mostly magic-less down the path to Garden, and if they encountered no monsters on the way then Selphie was going to be an optimist and put it down to luck instead of magic. Still…

"You aren't scared about showing up in front of Xu like…this?" she asked Rinoa.

Rinoa said, "Like what? There's nothing wrong with me."

Selphie begged to differ.

"Really? We're going with that?" she asked Rinoa. "You've been pretty weird."

Rinoa fixed her with a surprisingly apologetic look. "I know," she said. "I'll tell you when we're at Garden."

But in Xu's office, it became clear that when she said 'we', she meant more than just herself and Selphie.

"I know what's going on in Deling," she announced. "But I need Squall here when I explain it. And Zell. And Quistis and Irvine. Now. So bring them in and then I'll tell you."

Xu raised an eyebrow as though to indicate that she doubted Rinoa knew anything and doubted even more that she was going to be taking any orders from Rinoa. Next to her, Nida nodded amicably at the news that Rinoa had supposedly cracked a major case down in Deling, then returned to a fat book on the Ancient Centrans.

"Rinoa, that's nice," Xu said, "But your failure to stick with your team got one of my people – an actual SeeD, by the by – arrested, and we're still no closer to getting our hands on the GF—"

Something about this made Rinoa smile.

"Don't worry about that," she said.

Xu stared at her, irritated. Then she stared at Selphie. Selphie shrugged.

"Bring in Squall and Zell and Quistis and Irvine—" Rinoa said.

"Squall and Zell and Quistis are on a mission," Xu said irritably.

Nida cleared his throat. "About that," he began.

When he was done explaining, Xu looked ready to murder someone. Selphie felt for her. She expected Rinoa to feel for her, too, because Rinoa was a feel for you kind of person, but when she looked over Rinoa was only fiddling with the rings she always wore on a chain.

Something else about her was different, Selphie realized. Something besides the weird disconnect from her usual self. Something small. It took Selphie a second to get what.

"That's a nice choker, Rinoa," she said. Xu was in the process of chewing Nida out with laser-focus and no small amount of intense cruelty and didn't hear her, and so didn't chastise her for chatting with Rinoa during a debrief.

Rinoa's hand flew up to touch her new choker. It was loosely draped on her, a long silver oblong shape nestled slightly below her collarbone. Selphie noticing it made her look almost apprehensive for some reason.

"It looks familiar," Selphie said, because it did, but she couldn't place how. "I think I've seen it before?"

Probably Rinoa had worn it at some other point in time. But she just gave a nervous smile; she didn't say anything to confirm it.


	12. Chapter 12

At the edge of the black grounds, where Catkin's men had fallen, stood an odd trio. Fujin: thinner than normal, faded, sick. Cid: oddly impassioned; a round, determined little man. And Rexa?

She was angry.

"You don't need me," Rexa pointed out to Cid. "You could do it, even if it'll take the life out of someone as old as you. And if you're going to Trabia instead, you have Edea. Isn't she out there right now? Trying to keep people from hating her too much?"

Cid looked sheepish and slightly upset. He said, sighing, "We may have reached a difficult period in our marriage. The intimate bond—"

"YUCK," Fujin interrupted, tugging Seifer's coat around her to ward off the seaside chill near Cid's transport. "DISGUSTING. DON'T CARE."

"Fair enough," Cid said sadly. Then, as though he didn't at all note that Rexa didn't want to go with them, he turned to Fujin and said, "What do you know of how GFs work?"

Fujin put up her hands and made air quotes. "'NO MEMORY LOSS.' 'DON'T TRUST CRITICS.' 'PERFECTLY SAFE.'"

Rexa didn't get the reference and it must have shown on her face, because Fujin then turned to her and added, "TRAINING MANUAL. CID'S."

Cid sighed again.

"Yes, she is throwing my words back in my face," he said sadly. "I may have been wrong in putting that together, but—"

Rexa tuned him out. She took in Fujin's skinny, shivering figure – shivering more because of blood loss over the past few days than genuine cold, she thought – and considered what she knew about slippery Cid Kramer, and all those kids out in Balamb who worshipped the ground he walked on, even though he routinely withheld information from them. Apparently one of them was coming around. Good.

Fujin was a good kid. And Rexa wouldn't want to leave _her_ kid alone with Cid—

"Which, you see, is why we need you," Cid finished triumphantly, now apparently addressing her.

Whatever. Rexa was just making up her mind to come along anyway.

But Fujin held out a hand, stopping her.

"NO," she said. "DANGEROUS. ASK WITCH EDEA."

That Fujin had dropped into slurs when referring to Cid's wife said something of how she felt about the woman. Rexa would have taken offense, but she felt similarly about Edea herself, and anyway, she thought she liked the stricken look that danced across Cid's face. But that didn't erase the fact that using Edea would probably make the whole enterprise more dangerous for Fujin. Cid wouldn't throw his wife away, in a pinch. But he might toss a Garden cadet out like trash if he thought it served his aims. Hadn't he put Fujin to this whole harebrained enterprise in the first place?

And her sister would kill her if something happened to Fujin, she was sure of it.

But Fujin only waved her off.

"You can't trust him—" Rexa began.

"NO ONE ELSE," Fujin said. "GO HOME."

"If you don't come back—"

"TELL XU," Fujin said.

"You were going to tell your sister anyway. Be honest. That's why we selected you," Cid put in.

So, on the morning of the 20th, Cid and Fujin set out alone to meet Edea. Cid attempted to explain his hesitancy in these matters. Fujin was resolutely not hearing it. So he switched to discussing GFs and Knights.

He had a theory about GFs and Knights.

* * *

Putting Selphie and Rinoa on the case seemed to bring results. Xu was soon phoning Quistis, sounding increasingly irate underneath her veneer of icy calm. She had a White SeeD detail out to collect them and take them back to Garden within the hour. The White SeeDs weren't exactly under Xu's jurisdiction. Quistis wasn't sure how she'd commandeered them. It was just a talent of Xu's to wrangle all the resources and all the manpower when people weren't looking. Xu had never needed to be a good fighter or especially intelligent or card club king or anything to be crucial to Garden. Xu was simply a born politician. That was far more useful.

Xu would soon have all the GFs well within Garden's purview. That seemed to be the goal, anyway, going by Cid's GF list. Quistis had it spread out before her on the deck next to her phone and everything else she'd taken from his place: the translated poem, the strip of bloody sheet, Seifer's book.

It _was_ Seifer's. Not hers. It had been meant for Seifer. Quistis's furious resentment, her sense that she'd been passed over for someone she'd never been able to understand and was even less interested in understanding, had faded somewhat. She knew that her dislike of Seifer was a tangled thing. It came from how withering Seifer could be with everyone, how some people still seemed to like him even when he never did anything for them, while she did everything and always fell short.

But Seifer had lost.

That was just. That was right. He'd deserved to lose. Quistis didn't feel bad about that. She did, however, recognize that she was perhaps the sorest winner in the world. Restored to her position, rank A, considered a fashion trendsetter from here to Winhill, with an entire radio show devoted to figuring out where she would next be seen... These were the accoutrements of fame, though they weren't always nice to deal with. Even so. She would probably be able to retire at thirty and live out her days in a Dolletian mansion if she wanted. She could command crowds – hell, with the Trepies, she already did. This was winning.

It wasn't enough. It didn't fix how she felt about herself. And Seifer Almasy, loser that he was, lacking all those things that Squall and the rest of the orphanage gang had managed to snatch from him, was out there somewhere, coolly rebuffing Matron and Cid. Probably completely satisfied with himself, with the decisions that he'd made. Feeling as though he'd won. Even though he hadn't, and so he should have been as miserable and grateful for any scrap of affection as Quistis was.

Seifer didn't owe it to her to be unhappy, she knew. But she resented him for always being her opposite in that sense, always being comfortable in himself.

Screw Seifer.

Quistis snatched up his book. _The Nature of the Knight_. Florlina Drinnaks. Timber Independent Press. At least twenty years old, but in wonderful condition, which was rare for something out of Timber, where Deling's people had been bookburning for years. It must have cost Matron a nice lump of gil to obtain it. Seifer probably hadn't even thought about that, or cared if he had.

Quistis told herself that she was reading it because she was bored, not out of a bitter need to snatch up the knowledge Seifer had so carelessly rejected. She had nothing to do anyway. The White SeeDs were handling navigation, and Zone and Watts – Rinoa's old chums who now contracted with the White SeeDs to run missives from Timber to Esthar and back as a means of forging political alliance – had agreed to look after Squall and Zell. Zone and Watts had a compulsive need to look after Rinoa's interests even now, even though they seemed to consider her terminally ill with a bad case of magic. Rinoa was like that. She didn't have groupies. Even now, poisoned with sorcery in the eyes of the world, she retained sincerely devoted friends.

Quistis would have to ask her her secret. She opened the book. Matron's hand had scrawled out a message of love on the frontispiece. It wasn't for Quistis to read.

Bitterly, Quistis turned the page.

* * *

The Nature of the Knight

_Foreword_

It has been some time since I published the first edition of this book, and it is curious to me that this one should be so reviled now. At the time of publishing I believed its brother, _The Nature of the GF_, to be much more revolutionary.

Knights occupy a strange place in our culture. In this volume, I sought to uncover the truth of them, the truth of our history with these aggressors. I found instead only a succession of curious personalities. Vasko Phipps, a minor Timberi Knight whose sorceress, Mad Ada, is known only for a prophecy that signaled the end of their fair city. Jana Ki, who might have been a sorceress herself, but who repudiated the powers of her dead mistress. Caliban Bajo, the mutilated child prince of Ancient Centra, who seized arms to best his city's conqueror, the Warlord-King of Esthar.

Knights seek the perverse. They claim allegiance to the sorceress, enemy of man. Accordingly, many of them are villainous. Daemon Carteret, ancestor to the Delings, is best known for his destruction of the great Acenath empire and for attempting to drown his own sons in tar. Iseult Neve is said to have abandoned her father in the glacial wilds of Northern Trabia. Ignotus Romulus supposedly burned his best friend alive. But these nightmare caricatures are relegated to books now, and in their place we have Miss Kerr. Much is made of her sharp tongue, her clever cruelty, her penchant for legalized massacre. This is all very normal for a Knight. Knights are agents of evil.

But that is the broad strokes reading. Seen one by one, there appears a strange sliver of humanity in them as well. That is what I have tried to demonstrate here: their humanity. This is why, I think, the book has seemed so profane in the current political climate. Human beings cannot stand to recognize themselves in others when it would serve their purposes to deny any connection. Enflamed as the world is by Miss Kerr and the sorceress Adel, no one wishes to hear of the Knights of old as anything other than a menace, let alone as people like you or I. But I have not looked on them as simply menaces. Some of them were that, but in truth I feel that is a mark of some individuals, a result of some choices, not the fated end to all Knights, and not a taint on the breed.

All Knights are different. Unique. As all people are.

What they have in common is this: they have desired to fight the status quo, the traditional view of magic and its relation to humanity. They allied themselves with magic. We believe, from children's stories, from the tales of Hyne, that mankind and magic are opposed. We believe that Fate (the cruelest magic-user of all) places sorceresses in the world to torment us. We believe that sorceresses must all go wrong, go unnatural, go bloodthirsty.

Knights do not think this way.

There is one Knight I did not include in this text. His story is apocryphal and many believe he never existed. So I began this book, after some hemming and hawing, with the Knight respected historians acknowledge as the sole first Knight: Valknut Wardegrave. Wardegrave was Knight to Usra, who waged war against Vascaroon. We have on good account that Wardegrave truly existed. Usra we simply suspect did, because to be a Knight Wardegrave must have had a sorceress. But 'Usra' is little more than a placeholder name. Scholars say that it means 'first' in tongues that we have obliterated from the earth. It stands for the earliest sorceress we can pinpoint, one whose identity was erased from time. We have little concrete knowledge of Usra: only that she named herself enemy to Vascaroon, the man who revealed Hyne's deception to humanity and who exposed her magic.

Compared to her second Knight, however, Usra is something of a celebrity.

Professor Bustamante of Deling City University claims that the notion of a second Knight is absurd. One Knight for every sorceress. That is the maxim. Or at least one Knight at a time, as some sorceresses have liked to dispose of unworthy Knights, then take new ones. Even the Hillfin brothers, so close they shared a wife, served separate sorceresses: the Acenath princesses Kande and Kissa. A sorceress with two Knights is the stuff of fantasy, of horror stories used to frighten children. So now we come to the horror story of Usra's second knight.

It is really the story of Vascaroon in another form. Some of you will have heard it already. I apologize for the repetition and beg your indulgence. My version has some variations, a few new details. I entreat you to read it closely.

Legends revere Vascaroon as a hero. But he was not a hero, because heroes, say our Deling City presses, are simple soldiers who would die for Deling and country. I have no opinion on the topic. I am simply a voracious reader who knows a good deal of history, particularly the history of curious and ancient things. I can therefore report with some authority that Vascaroon would never have died for any country. He preferred to molder away in a tower. He was an academic, a pencil-pusher of the Zebalga Dynasty, a royal scholar. His chief discipline was the study of magic, which the Zebalga were obsessed with claiming for themselves. To their chagrin, magic belonged to Hyne and the monsters. Hyne they could not touch. They tried, but Vascaroon proved this to be a foolish endeavor. Hyne's magical half rested in sorceresses, and was not for the Zebalga to possess.

Monsters were a different story. The Zebalga made sport of catching and breeding moon monsters, and doing the same to any curious creature that caught their eye, many now regarded as fantastical and or at least extinct: lions, wolves, owls, bears. Being Ancient Centrans, the Zebalga also did things in the sensational Ancient Centran manner, constructing floating cities hovering atop mountains, wondrously advanced palaces that could fly, and entire districts connected to the earth only by the thinnest of cables. But they were willing to plunge into the earth as well, to capture magical creatures and dig up bones and similar treasures, from which they hoped they could obtain monster magic. They established trading links from the heavens down to the core of hell, pipelines through which to exchange new beasts, and out of these beasts their scholars – among them Vascaroon – refined the first potions and phoenix downs, refined remedies, created ways to snatch magic for use by man.

It was not enough.

The Zebalga longed for an Odine, I think, for someone who could give them magic of their own. But GFs did not exist then, or at least were not recorded in any ancient documents, and so junctioning was a thing of the distant future. They were not to have an Odine. They had merely a Vascaroon. Perhaps, given the rumors circling around that esteemed Estharian Doctor and his preferred test subjects, this was for the better.

However, perhaps not.

Vascaroon, too, experimented on people. All the great scholars of the Zebalga did: the alchemists, the monster breeders, the surgeons, the biologists, the metalworkers who sought to meld man and machine. And it was not simply slaves or criminals or captured enemies or helpless children that they worked on. The elite among the Zebalga sought to be stronger, more magical. Vascaroon and his fellow scholars made these dreams reality for them. They created intelligent beings with far more magic than man has ever dreamt of: Shumi and Moogles. They invented useful mounts: chocobos. They unwittingly bred curious oddities: Tonberrys. And in these small ways, they succeeded in combining monster and human. They snatched magic back for man, in a sense, though by the time they'd finished their subjects were men no longer.

Vascaroon regarded these beings as a failure. He wanted to make something greater still. He wanted to invent something with all the powers of Hyne, who had cut his magic away and offered up to humanity only his dead, worthless skin. He wanted to create something that could extract magic in the same fashion: a natural power distiller. He wanted a creature that could alight upon a beast and, without excessive experimentation, simply seize up the magic inside it, tear the magic from the non-magic parts, and offer it up for use by the Zebalga.

The draw technique that Odine has developed would have astounded and pleased Vascaroon, I think.

But draw was beyond the technology or understanding of his time. Instead, Vascaroon and his cronies designed a cutting creature, a natural magic thief, a being that could split one in two and from the laceration harvest perfect power. In the recipe, the alchemical mixture, they combined all those things that claw and tear and destroy. They began with the bodies of their ancient enemies, the fearsome early Estharians, harvested from battlefields and still containing just a breath of life. In these the surgeons, under Vascaroon's direction, replaced key components: human brain lobes they supplanted with the lion's roaring instinct, and heart valves they nudged aside to make way for excess chambers stolen from the ruby dragon. The monster breeders supplied these parts and more, delivered up flanks of behemoths and the claws of bears: anything that possessed the power to bite and snatch. The metalworkers, trafficking in substances that conduct electricity, fiddled with synapses; the biologists mapped out the areas in which new enzymes could be introduced, where the body might be altered to better make a human cleaver. But the crowning glory came from the alchemists, of which Vascaroon was the leader. They took the pieces of Hyne's skin, powerless but possessing significant propagandistic value, and transmuted it into liquid, and this they injected into the blood, and so the very capillaries of these new beings, while no more magical than they had been before, became, in a sense, connected to Hyne.

At last they were ready. Vascaroon's children. The creatures that could rip magic from others.

The Zebalga awaited the moment when they would open their eyes. Their conquered slaves held moon monsters at the ready. These monsters were to be ripped open, their magic stolen; they were to be the first test subjects. The king of the Zebalga, long-convinced that Hyne had hidden his best magic inside the earth, gave orders to open the mouth of their pipeline there. They would unleash Vascaroon's creations on hell itself, and take from hell the magic hidden away by Hyne and lost to them, buried too deep to be accessed before now.

But when Vascaroon's creatures awoke, they did not jump to harvest magic from hell. They held out hands to the assembled crowd and every one of the Zebalga began to feel simultaneously weightless and very heavy indeed. Their bodies dropped out from under them, falling in heaps as though every being in the city were suddenly going to sleep right where they stood, and their souls, their minds, their consciousness floated upwards. Ripped from them. The great floating city gave a heave and a shudder; the controllers who kept it afloat had lost their minds and fallen into a slump at their posts. The massive flying palaces careened into the Centran mountaintops, and the soulless bodies had no choice to yield to gravity, dropping onto the hillsides below, painting the slopes leading down into the Kashkabald with blood.

The Zebalga had created these creatures to rip magic away from unassuming beasts and even from sorceresses themselves, but they'd forgotten something. Ordinary humans have something very like magic as well. It is the great engine that propels us, the inner sense of self, the accouterments of identity – it is the part of us that is not the body, but merely trapped within it. Vascaroon, without realizing it, had created a mechanism to set this great insubstantial human-ness free.

Where did they go? All those souls? No one knows. But when they were done harvesting these things, Vascaroon's creations stepped over his soulless body, slipped along the halls of that palace hurtling to the ground, and, monstrous and secure, jumped to safety.

And so began an era of terror in the world. Everywhere they went these beasts performed their function, cleaving man from himself in search of the magic they believed he possessed. Until they should alert the sorceress: Usra. Usra had long opposed the Zebalga's experiments, and was not surprised to find that they had created a monster to end all monsters. She herself was safe from them, of course. As the world's foremost magic user, she reigned supreme, and had long shut herself and her people up in a city on the Northern Centra island, an invisible fortress against the Zebalga searching to take Hyne's magic from her.

Now she considered perhaps revealing herself. An evil spread throughout the world in the form of these new creatures, and she suspected that only she could defeat it.

Her Knight, Valknut Wardegrave, would not fight them. He had long done her bidding and cut down many a Zebalga soldier. In the process, he'd taken up a hatred of that particular people. He believed them to be well-served by their creations, and though now these final beasts spread across Centra in a swath of devastation, leaving only soulless husks behind, he was unmoved. Too long had he seen his sorceress slandered by humanity. Now that she considered protecting people, he took her for foolish. He was interested only in salvaging those bits of the Zebalga empire that had survived complete annihilation for use by Usra's people. He would hunt after echo screens, elixirs, useful new inventions. But their enemies' monsters, he said, could continue to roam the world, bringing fear and death to all opponents of the sorceress.

Usra's domain would be eternal, and the reign of mankind short and terrible by comparison, and this, Wardegrave believed, was only fair.

Saddened, Usra gave in to his demands, and as the world burned around them, the followers of the sorceress sought only to pluck prizes from the wreckage, like carrion-eaters.

Save one man. Little is known of him. His name is lost to time – he identified himself as a common scoundrel, and appeared in Usra's city claiming the identity of a penitent, a wretch who needed to atone. He wished to pledge himself to the sorceress. She did not wish to accept him. But then he revealed a curious power. He had no soul to steal.

_How can this be?_ Usra asked.

_I am powerless in every sense,_ said the man. _I am weightless already. I am nothing, merely a husk. Should these monsters attempt to strip away the soul in me, they would find nothing. Should they try to rip away my essence, they would come away with empty hands._

This made him the perfect weapon: he could fight the Zebalga's creations instead of merely hiding from them. And so Usra took him as her second Knight. But one man alone could not fight an entire army of beasts. Usra realized she would have to use cunning, not force, and devised a plan. She challenged the monsters to come to her fortress, told them outright that she'd taken a Knight expressly to defeat them.

The monsters came in droves. Her second Knight fought them, giving no quarter. There were many of them to begin with, for Vascaroon had been ambitious in their creation, and they had bred in the time it took Usra to prepare her plan. But, just as it seemed her second Knight's strength would fail, the sorceress Usra opened her mouth and spoke a single word, an Evocation, an ancient word of power in the language of Hyne. And the ground beneath her domain shuddered, and it bent to her will. She had studied the pipeline the Zebalga had built to the center of the earth, to Hell, to the Netherworld. Now she replicated it, causing the ground to swallow whole the Nether Rippers.

For that is what they were. Bogeymen. Children's fears. Nether Rippers. And to keep them from climbing back to the surface of the world, Usra placed her first knight, Wardegrave, as a watchman at the gates of her ruined city, above the spot where they were buried, and that is why there we find so much compelling archeological evidence of Wardegrave's existence.

Her second Knight? The one who fought the Nether Rippers? We do not know what became of him. Perhaps the Nether Rippers dragged him down to Hell, where they roam forevermore, though parents who wish their children not to wander will tell them that, now and then, a Nether Ripper sneaks up to the surface of the world in search of souls to rip away.

A curious story, so fantastic it must be untrue. But I see some meaning in it. We do not believe it, but still we tell it. We tell children that it was man who made the monsters. We tell them that it was a sorceress and her Knight who protected man. This is a bedtime story, or perhaps a story to make a campfire more chilling than it needs to be, but I think it is also the narrative that exists in the minds of the Knights. In their minds, they are not villains. The world calls them scoundrels, but they see themselves as protectors.

This is the key to understanding the Knights.

There is more to say on the topic of Knights and GFs. I have sprinkled my works with steps to my ultimate thesis, to a truth so stunning that it may shock the world to the core. But, like Vascaroon, I am an academic, and a good academic always checks her sources, so I bid my publisher adieu and go to seek out the truth, or at least the stories that may give rise to the truth. And when I return I will perhaps connect the dots for you, my faithful readers.

Your devoted author,

Florlina Drinnaks

* * *

Zell woke up on the way to Garden, and he woke by screaming his way out of his dream, lurching upwards in complete defiance of Quistis's spell on him (his GFs hadn't liked being confined, and might have helped him a little), and punching Watts in the jaw. Watts went down like gravity had suddenly taken a special liking to him and decided to tone it up, just for him, just this once, just to make it special.

Zone gave a high shriek and tried to fade into the wall of the small cabin.

It took Zell a second to process where he was, feel apologetic, discover Squall motionless and silently screaming, and decide to find Quistis. He picked Watts up and passed him off to his friend. Probably the guy needed medical attention. Zell patted them both in apology, his mind elsewhere, his thoughts not yet settled. Then he went up to the White SeeD deck.

It was a big ship. It took him a while to find his bearings for that reason. And also because he was still shaken. He didn't feel like himself. He felt like someone had lifted him up, transported him into another life.

Raijin's.

Raijin's? Why Raijin's? Zell didn't like Raijin, not in any way, shape, or form.

This dislike wasn't personal. Or, well, _Zell_ hadn't made it personal. He'd always been kind to Raijin. In training, in class, in line for hot dogs, while nonchalantly reading Pupurun in that corner of the library where no one could find them and make fun of them for reading Pupurun. If it had been up to Zell, he and Raijin could have had an easy camaraderie. Maybe not been best friends or anything. That was inconceivable: being friends with a member of DC. But even so. Zell had always treated Raijin well. And actually, in those spare moments when it was just the two of them, Raijin had never had a cruel word to offer Zell. Raijin generally didn't say cruel things. Probably you had to be capable of independent thought to come up with cruel things to say.

Raijin wasn't independent. He'd always come on the heels of a pack: the Disciplinary Committee. And he wasn't the pack leader, so maybe Zell had never hated him as much as he'd hated certain other people (Seifer; this was a dig at Seifer), but then what did that matter? Raijin had always been there in the background, cheering on his chosen ringleader. The born follower. There to watch as Zell got written up for pretend infractions; there to occupy Zell's hometown on his friend's stupid orders.

Up until the occupation of Balamb Zell's dislike for Raijin hadn't even been that intense. Zell had, in many ways, wanted to be liked by the DC. He wanted to be liked by everybody; no one liked being disliked. But the DC were a special case, because the DC had always thought that they were, well. Special. And in a weird way they had been. Not good kids, not in any way. Swaggering troublemakers and hypocrites, enforcing rules they themselves had no intention of following, and headed up by Garden's most unapologetic mess. But they had a special place in Garden, and it wasn't just that Cid had always had more faith in them than they deserved, that they'd been given free rein to write people up and stuff. It was that they held themselves apart. They would never stoop so low as to be sociable, kind, fair, even moderately respectful. Instead they were all, even dumb lunk Raijin, standouts.

The DC – though they were stupid, unthinking, and bad at following orders – had had istyle/i.

It was in their strut, their constant unity. It was in their secret references to stupid lists, their ability to master difficult topics, their open disregard for the Shumi guardians, their unique weapons. Seifer had been the only one to share his specialty with another Garden cadet in their unit – Squall – and didn't _that_ stick in his craw. But that was alright, because Seifer was tall, and good-looking, and always the center of attention. If the room didn't go silent when he walked in, then he always had a way of making it do so, usually by picking on somebody. Usually Zell. So Zell hated Seifer, and Zell hated, by extension, Seifer's stupid friends. But...

But now he had a different view of Raijin.

Not that he'd asked for it.

When he found Quistis, she was buried in a book. Without thinking, Zell brought the cover down firmly with one hand, making her shriek. Then she straightened and looked at him and said, "Zell? Is Squall—"

Zell shook his head. He wanted to tell her what he'd seen. But his throat was raw, and for once in his life he felt tired, and, most of all, he just couldn't form words.

"What happened?" Quistis said, taking him in.

Zell put a hand to his throat, like this was going to make him speak better. It didn't, but the gesture reminded him of Ma, of Ma's little touches to his forehead whenever he'd had a fever. He'd long outgrown those though, would vociferously deny ever having received them if someone ever confronted him about it. But the gesture comforted him. He opened his mouth. He wanted to tell Quistis everything.

It was a very simple story. But a long one - lives, even short lives like Raijin's, took a while to get going. They could go on and on and on; there were a million moments and a million details you could pack into just eighteen or nineteen years; Zell knew that firsthand now.

The story went: boy is born.

Boy lives.

Boy catches the attention of the wrong people.

Raijin had caught the attention of the wrong people. And Ellone had dropped Zell in Raijin's mind long enough to let him see the full effects of that. Ellone was funny like that. She could send you back in time. She could trap you where you didn't want to be.

She could make time go on forever, too. In real world terms, how long had he been gone? Quistis looked the same – the same age and everything. Squall, below decks, still trapped himself – looked the same. It couldn't have been years. It couldn't have been a whole lifetime. He couldn't have been – briefly, ever so briefly, yet at the same time for so _long_ – somebody else entirely.

So why had he felt as though he had been? Like he'd lived a lifetime as Raijin?

"Who were you?" Zell asked hoarsely, instead of explaining. He had to know. Ellone had sent him back. She was obviously still sending Squall back. She usually did it in threes; Quistis had to be the only one left. And Zell wanted to know what she'd seen, because he wanted to get to the bottom of this. He wanted to figure out why Ellone was doing this now of all times; she couldn't want to change the past, not anymore.

Unless she wanted to change Raijin's past. And Fujin's. And Seifer Almasy's. Unless she still thought that could be done.

"I—Ellone didn't take me," Quistis said hastily. "I don't know why. She usually—hey!"

Cursing, Zell seized up her vid phone, lying there next to what looked like a strip of bloody sheet. He didn't spare a thought for the sheet; he didn't have time. He just punched in the number, digging it up out of his memory, his painful brain, where it felt like his GFs were clawing to keep it.

They were unsettled too.

Ellone picked up very quickly. Her face filled the screen at first – pale, wide brown eyes, nice looking in a homey, normal, humble Winhill way. She squinted at the phone as though she was surprised to find Quistis calling her (which she probably was; none of them really kept up a regular correspondence with her except maybe Squall), and seemed less surprised when she saw it was Zell, and then rapidly began to look worried because Zell's face must have shown his upset.

"Yes?" she said tentatively.

Zell stared at her. It didn't seem right, all of a sudden, that she should look so kind, so normal. Not with what she could do. Not with what she was willing to do: mess with a person so thoroughly that it was like they weren't even themselves anymore. They had their identity ripped away. They became people they never wanted to be. How was that right?

"Why'd you do it?" Zell asked her.

"Zell," Quistis began warningly. His fury must be showing in his voice. Zell didn't care if it was.

Ellone looked suddenly very said. She said, very simply, "I thought you'd ask before now. I thought one of you would. I guess I'm surprised it was you, Zell. I know Squall knows—"

"How can you talk about Squall when you're doing it to him right now?" Zell yelled. He was shaking the phone, because it was _wrong_, what she was doing. Squall loved her. She might've been the only person in the world, besides Rinoa, that Squall had ever loved. And still she used him. She threw him out of his own head and then sat there looking sad and normal when confronted about it. She had no right to look sad and normal. She wasn't normal, and what she was doing to them wasn't right.

Zell had been used by plenty of people in his life. He was a mercenary, and that was what being a mercenary was about. But he'd signed up for that. He'd never signed up to let Ellone fling him around time.

"Look," he said furiously, cutting off whatever Ellone was about to say in her defense. "I get it. Maybe you don't like that Fujin and Raijin and Seifer Almasy went wrong or whatever—"

"What?" said Ellone.

"What?" said Quistis, for some reason looking very unnerved and clutching her book.

"But you should've learned by now that what's happened happened!" Zell continued savagely. "You can't mess with time. The last person who did that? We ended her. And I thought you of all people—"

"Zell," Ellone said, very softly.

"No! Let me finish!" Zell said. Now he'd found his words again, found his sense of self again. Now he wasn't dumb and off-kilter, halfway between himself and Raijin. Now he was a little angry, flushed with fury he had to get out somewhere, somehow, if only by yelling at Ellone. Ellone had been jerking him around, hauling him and Squall through time, leaving them linked to experiences they didn't want, people they shouldn't be expected to sympathize with, suffering tortures that didn't belong to them. She'd struck some hits against them. He was gonna make her feel those hits. He was gonna let her know they'd connected, and that she was responsible for them.

"You want me to help Raijin Dobe," Zell said, "You call up to Garden, and you can damn well _hire me_."

"Okay, what?" said Quistis, still out of the loop.

Zell ignored her. "I get it!" he said. "The guy's in trouble! I hate him, but fine. Fine. I'll help if I have to. But we're not gonna do it by undoing his mistakes. You can't change the past, and you shoulda learned that by now—"

"I did," Ellone said quickly, looking panicked.

"No, you didn't!" Zell said. "You threw us back, again, and—"

"To Raijin?" Ellone said, making it sound like a question.

"You know damn right to Raijin!" Zell roared.

He hated that she was so calm about it, that her face was so falsely compassionate, that she seemed more worried than upset that he was yelling at her. He didn't like falseness; he'd had enough of it to last him more than his eighteen years. And he'd thought that he was through with manipulative and careless people: Matron was up North somewhere, making nice with the Trabians. Cid was down in Centra getting ready to trick the Estharians out of some sinkhole. Seifer Almasy had finally done the only just thing and completely removed himself from everyone's life.

So the only people left were the good people, the straightforward people, the ones that wouldn't want to use you or hurt you to achieve their own aims. Or at least that was how it was supposed to go. Right? The two-faced, the secretive liars, the bullies – they lost. And you won: all the good people won. The good people won, passed the SeeD test, made rank A, made the papers, finally got a bite at the hot dog. The bad people? Fuck 'em.

Only here was Ellone, happy and safe in Esthar, sweet-seeming and reunited with Laguna. But no matter how sweet she pretended to be, she knew she was capable of some very strange, unsettling, wrong things. And Raijin – Raijin wasn't so bad. But he'd been fucked over; Zell had seen it. Ellone had shown it to him, in a bid at playing Hyne again, at getting the orphanage gang to fix something she thought was wrong.

And the problem was: it was wrong. Zell had lived a lifetime as Raijin. And so, furiously, he discovered that he didn't hate Raijin anymore. He hadn't ever really hated him, but now it was impossible not to feel bad for the guy: when Zell had left him, he'd been getting _tortured_, for Hyne's sake.

"Fine," Zell said, more than a little bitterly. "Fine. I'll see what I can do about Raijin. But you wake Squall up. Now. And you've gotta promise that you're never, ever gonna do this to us again."

"Zell—" Ellone began.

"I don't wanna hear excuses! Those are the terms!" Zell said, and hung up the phone. Then, for good measure, he threw it down, strode over to the rail of the ship, and got in three good blows to calm himself down before it splintered. Two White SeeDs came running, shouting.

"Zell!" Quistis said, scandalized.

"Whatever, man. I'm rank A. Take it out of my next paycheck," he muttered. He turned to go downstairs. Now that he knew that Quistis was fine, that she hadn't been taken, he wanted to check on Squall. He'd left Squall below-decks, still seemingly trapped in Ellone's dream world. Well. Ellone had heard the terms, and now she knew. She had to wake Squall up, or they weren't going to get anywhere. It wasn't that he didn't want to help Raijin – he did. But he wasn't going to do it on Ellone's terms. He was going to do it on his.

"Zell," Quistis said again, coming up before him and blocking his way. She put her hands firmly on his shoulders to keep him from moving past her. Only a former Instructor would ever dare do this; anyone else would have expected a punch to the face, but Quistis knew she had an old blanket of academic authority, and besides this she knew more about him than most people probably did.

"She made you Raijin?" Quistis confirmed, after a minute.

Zell nodded.

"And he's in trouble?" Quistis said.

Another nod.

"And now you want to help Raijin for some reason?" Quistis said.

Zell opened his mouth to reply but then figured it would take too much time. They had to check on Squall first. He said, "C'mon, man, Squall is—"

"Okay," Quistis said, relenting. "Okay. I'm worried about you, too, though, you know."

He acknowledged this with another nod and she let him lead the way downstairs. Zone and Watts shrank back when they went into the cabin. Squall was unchanged. Zell stared down at him, at their friend, his handsome face frozen, his limbs stiff at his side, his eyes wide open and horrified. It didn't look like him. It didn't look right. How could someone do this to Squall? How could someone he loved that much do it to him?

Zell cursed again, and, wary, Zone and Watts edged toward the door.

"I guess she's not accepting the terms," Quistis said, her voice very hard.

Zell had a powerful urge to tear the whole ship apart – and he could, too; he knew he could. Except that he was on the ship, so it would be a bad idea. What was he gonna do after: strap Quistis and Squall to a pair of dolphins and hope they all made it back to Garden in time?

So instead he just said, suddenly feeling uncharacteristically defeated, "I guess she's not."

There was silence. After a minute, Quistis said, "Maybe we can figure out why, though. Zell, what did you see?"


	13. Chapter 13

Raijin had rarely junctioned, so he'd had a lot of memories. And with those memories came a clear, powerful, perfect sense of identity. Rooted in a greater, more detailed, more _remembered_ past than Zell had ever had.

At first, Zell had felt slightly drunk on it.

Raijin was from Fisherman's Horizon. Fisherman's Horizon - the junk town. When Zell had discovered this, his first thought had been: did Seifer Almasy even know that his cronies were from there? It seemed wrong, somehow. Not appropriate for the disciplinary committee, who'd always tried to be so aloof and cool. How could they be from a place that was the opposite of that? FH made Balamb look like a major city center. FH was plump cats picking through piles of old machinery, weapons taken apart and re-formed into solar panels and fishing poles, children laughing from the innards of an old Estharian tank, now a makeshift playhouse.

Fisherman's Horizon had no use for all the bits and pieces of war.

Or, rather, the people there had too many uses for that stuff: all of it strange. They turned grey submarines into cozy little houses, used codes and relay systems as a PA system to warn each other of any strange characters that might be wandering about. Garden took in everything the sorceress wars had produced and perfected it: orphans became soldiers, Odine's magic system became a standardized curriculum. But in FH magic didn't matter. Magic! What did the residents of FH need magic for, when they had the sun and the surf, a lifetime to spend gazing out over the blue sea, watching the windmills turn lazily, the light reflecting on the water?

And orphans didn't stay orphans in FH. When the engineers that would build FH had left Esthar, they'd gathered up plains refugees, wounded soldiers - anyone who'd needed a home. So Raijin's mother had found her way there, and died, and when she'd died no one had batted an eye at raising the kids she left behind. Mayor Dobe took them in gladly and raised them in the house at the center of the glittering solar panel: two kids left to run the whole junk pile however they wanted.

Until Seifer Almasy.

FH had a steady trickle of aimless people coming in all the time: people who'd lost their livelihoods to the Galbadians, people who were wanted for political crimes and feared being sent to the D-District, drifters and army deserters tired of war. Most of them came and stayed, or else came, went to Esthar, saw nothing but the dried up salt lake, then returned to FH and stayed. FH was a junk pile, but it was a welcoming junk pile. So for a very, very long time, only a few people had ever left Fisherman's Horizon for good after coming to visit. It had only happened twice in the time that Raijin lived there.

The first time it was a man who couldn't have been familiar to Raijin in any way, though he was familiar to Zell. Zell knew that slim form, that loping way of moving, those shrewd dark eyes. He'd come over from the Esthar side. He hadn't come across the bridge; people from Esthar didn't do that. He'd taken an underwater transport, and it had bobbed up in full view, making the residents of FH uneasy, and a skinny, defiant seven-year-old Fujin Dobe had picked up a metal pipe and advanced along the edge of the pier, ready to defend against the intruder, until her adoptive father had come up behind her and made her put the pipe down, and scolded Raijin for letting his sister get so violent.

"Whatever you want," Mayor Dobe had said, addressing the transport, "We're willing to talk about giving it to you. But we don't fight here. We won't even fight Esthar. Esthar's in the past for us, you hear?"

The submarine had been too sleek, too polished, to be from anywhere else. It attached itself gracefully to the pier and raised itself further up from the water, and then a pair of gleaming blue doors on the side had slid open. And out he'd walked, reserved and unruffled: Kiros Seagill himself. He'd bowed to Mayor Dobe.

"You're not from Esthar," Mayor Dobe had said, looking him over with surprise.

Kiros had inclined his head. In the memory, young Raijin thought that he really didn't look like he was from the Esthar continent. He looked like those people in old storybooks about Northwest Galbadia, the slim and regal people of the ancient pyramid kingdoms. Raijin had stared up at him, impressed. Fujin, trapped in Mayor Dobe's grip, had bared her teeth. Kiros had looked down at them as though he found this amusing, then reached out a hand and ruffled Fujin's hair. The Mayor had let him do it; they really didn't kid around about not fighting in FH, not even if strange weirdoes showed up to touch their kids, apparently. But in this case the gesture had defused some of the tension. Fujin had been, improbably, a very sweet-looking girl, with two eyes and a pretty jeweled ornament like a bindi beneath the right one, a present from her deceased mother. She was a strange kid – all rough play and imaginary friends and manhandling her brother – but it made sense to want to ruffle her hair; for all that she'd be terrifying later, at that age she'd seemed ruffle-able, somehow.

"Look," Mayor Dobe said tiredly. "We don't plan on going back. Esthar didn't want what we had to offer, didn't want peace. So if you want us to help you fight, if that's what this is about, you'll have to kill us-"

"NO!" Fujin had shouted then.

Kiros had held up hands, pacifying. "I'm not here to kill anyone, or to drag you back. You're right that I'm not originally from Esthar. I'm working with the new president: that's all. It's him I'm loyal to. Not Esthar. And he didn't want to bother you unless it was absolutely necessary. But the truth is: I've checked everywhere else."

"Checked for what?" Mayor Dobe had said, leaning back to better adjust his grip on the rebellious, struggling Fujin.

Kiros Seagill had looked down at her and put his hand on her hair again.

"A girl," he'd said. "Children come here, don't they? Lost ones. Lost people. There's only a handful of places that'll take them, and over the years I've checked them all. Dollet, Timber. I've just been down to this old orphanage in Centra we discovered. But no one's seen her. Or so they say." He'd bent down until he and Fujin were looking eye to eye. "The last time I saw her," he said. "She looked like you, a little. But she'd be much bigger now."

"We're not going to deliver a little girl to the Estharian government," said Mayor Dobe. "Seven or eight years ago, that-that would have been- they were stealing little girls. So-"

"I know," Kiros had said. "But you're going to stop me if I want to look around for her. You don't fight. But I do."

And so he'd looked around. He had with him a photo of Ellone, faded and wrinkled. No one in FH would tell him if they'd seen her, but neither would they bar him access to their houses, their boats, their fishing nooks. FH was an open book. After a while, Fujin and Raijin had tagged along beside him, against Mayor Dobe's wishes.

"WHY?" Fujin had asked blankly.

"What do you need her for, ya know?" Raijin had asked Kiros. "What's her name?"

"I'll tell you if you can take me to her," Kiros had said easily, looking calmly through the rooms of the FH inn. Neither child could take him to Ellone, so they were never to know it was Ellone he was looking for, and none of the three - of course - could know that Ellone had been placed on the White SeeD ship that very year, or that, not so far away, Cid Kramer was unveiling Balamb Garden, a locus for all the world's lost children. These were things Zell knew, far in the future, and could match against the clear memory in Raijin's head. But the Raijin back then had had no idea, so all he'd done was stare dubiously at the sharp blades in Kiros's belt.

"Look like fins, ya know?" he'd told Kiros. "But sharp."

"You look like a plainsman," Kiros told him. "But small, and safe, and alive."

Raijin had stared up at him. Kiros had said thoughtfully, "I thought you were all dead. I had a friend once who wanted to travel the world: his dearest dream was to meet a plainsman. But by the time he got around to doing it, Batibat Kerr had killed them all. Or so we thought. I guess some ended up here."

"If someone comes and kills us," Fujin had said, startling her brother by suddenly breaking into normal speech, "We won't be able to do anything about it. You could kill us with those fins right now."

Kiros had stared down at her, sympathetic. Something had passed between them that Raijin hadn't been able to understand at the time; Zell, viewing the memory in Raijin's head years later, had recognized it as a kind of communion between two born soldiers, two born fighters. Kiros had then said, "It must get lonely around here, thinking like that. I'll bet no one else lets that thought bother them. So you can't say it to anyone: it's a thought you can't communicate. That's a terrible thing: you can't talk to them. So why bother saying a lot at all?"

And that was all Raijin remembered of Kiros Seagill, to him a nameless curiosity. A not-Estharian Estharian, who'd bobbed up one day looking for a girl, and found instead an entirely different girl: a warlike person trapped in FH, blowing angrily from pier to pier like a confined wind spirit. And then years had passed, nearly five of them, before someone else came to FH who could be a kindred spirit for Fujin. But this time he came from the West, and he came walking across the bridge.

He didn't have his coat back then. He was shivering because he'd cast off his cadet's jacket in a fit of temper. And he wasn't alone.

In Raijin's memory, Seifer had been visible a long way off down the length of the bridge, but no one in FH had moved to stop him as he approached. Nor to stop the other figures behind him: a harassed-looking, familiar girl, a few years older than he was, and a round, fatherly man holding Seifer's cadet jacket up with one hand and puffing in his struggle to keep up with the other two.

Cid Kramer had come to FH with two of his cadets in tow and with a very specific objective. The three of them trooped directly into Mayor Dobe's house and sat cross-legged (or, in Xu's case, primly kneeling) on the floor, all surrounded by the Mayor's beeping consoles - repurposed now as miniature solariums, makeshift microwaves, and who-knew-what else. The Mayor hadn't yet remarried to Flo in those days, so he was the only one to greet the newcomers. He looked at them as sternly as he'd looked at Kiros Seagill. He'd told his children to stay out of sight, in case these people didn't respect FH's solemn pacifist principles. The blond boy, after all, carried a blade bigger than his arm. The dark-haired girl caught her skirt on a tangle of wire sticking from the wall and her whip clattered out onto the floor. Mayor Dobe coughed pointedly at it and said, "I'm going to have to ask you to leave."

Seifer had openly goggled at this, leaning back and spreading out his legs on the floor as though determined to grow roots and stay fixed right there in response, right on that spot, just to spite Dobe. Xu had looked at the Headmaster with furious appeal in her eyes, as though she couldn't believe Dobe would dare to chuck them out. But Headmaster Cid had only held his arms up appeasingly.

"Please, please," he'd said. "We aren't going to fight you-"

Both Seifer and Xu had looked almost betrayed to hear this.

"-I'm here on a summer trip. An assignment for these two: to keep them busy over the vacation. My students, you know."

"Cadets," Seifer had put in brusquely, spreading out his arms and tilting his chin, posing. Preening, really. As he'd gotten older, he'd grown broader and more imposing and figured out the trick of making this look natural. But back then he'd just been a lanky preteen, so, Zell was delighted to discover, it had just looked a little silly.

Certainly Xu had thought so. She said, "Oh please. A few months ago you were a Junior Classman."

"Children," Cid had said, making them both start and glare at him. He continued addressing Dobe as though he hadn't been interrupted. "Esteemed Mayor," Cid said. "We don't come to fight. Xu knew of this place through a family connection." He looked over at Xu and nodded slightly.

Xu took this as her cue. She said, "My oldest sister's Rexa Arismendi. You know her- she's been here. She travels everywhere. She's the Card Queen. She said you all - all of you used to be Estharian. You may live like this now, but you've all got engineering degrees-"

"So do Asede's people up in Trabia," Dobe said dismissively.

"We spoke to Asede," Cid said. "He said that no one from Odine's lab defected to Trabia. He didn't get along with Odine himself, you know, they were like Drinnaks and Bustamante-" Cid had chuckled at this, as though it were very funny "-and so he has no idea what to do now. You see, we operate out of a place called Garden. You might have heard of it?" At Dobe's blank stare, he shook his head ruefully and said, "Well. Maybe it's for the best that you haven't. But the truth is: the Garden is an old, old structure: a Centra structure, and everyone knows Odine's people knew Centra design better than anyone else.

"Our trouble is: we live in the Garden, but we don't really understand it. And in the past few years we've been trying to improve the place. Xu here: she says the children should have a quad, a place to sit and relax. And a proper training center. It's-we have the space for it. But how do you take a place like Garden - I mean a shelter; that's what it is. And turn it into a school?"

This repurposing attitude seemed to touch something in Dobe. Though he still seemed wary of the newcomers, he leaned in thoughtfully and said, "What is the Garden?"

And, deftly, Cid Kramer avoided telling the renowned pacifist that it was a place where he turned children into soldiers. He said instead, "Like I said: it used to be a shelter. One of the great Centra shelters. I've added to it, here and there. I needed classrooms, and places for the children - I look after children; I'm the headmaster of our little school - to sleep, and a kitchen, and I was thinking, oh, maybe now I should give it a paint job, at least. But as I mentioned: really what we need is a kind of miniature jungle for the training center. A place like the real wilderness-"

"That would cost you a nice pile of gil even if it could be done," Dobe had said doubtfully.

"I can pay," Cid had said, no doubt thinking of NORG.

And they'd fallen into discussing logistics. Xu had leaned in to hear more of the conversation, fascinated. But Seifer had turned his head to the side and surveyed his surroundings, evidently bored. In the memory, Raijin assumed he was bored. But there was also a layer of knowledge Raijin had added to the memory over time, the knowledge of what made Seifer tic, and so he recalled not someone exasperated with a dull adult conversation as much as someone who was paying attention - but with only half of himself. The other half of Seifer was studying Mayor Dobe's sunlit, airy, cluttered room. Looking for something. On a mission of his own.

His eyes lit on two figures half-hidden in the stairwell, listening where their father wouldn't be able to spot them.

Fujin. Raijin.

Seifer drew in his legs and pulled himself into a crouch, being uncharacteristically unobtrusive about it for him, then slipped across the room to greet them. Xu didn't notice. She was arguing the finer points of quad design with Mayor Dobe: how many trees did a person need to see, really? And who cared if the space wasn't ideal for peaceful meditation? Who wanted to meditate? She never meditated.

Cid did notice. And he did something odd in that moment: he put up a hand like he wanted to stop Seifer, and then thought better of it. He let him go. Seifer crossed to the darkened stairs and, shooting Fujin and Raijin a cool look, jumped down the steps to the interior of the house, then out the front door, then sauntered backwards along the platform that bordered the mayor's house so that they could see him clearly through the open door. At the edge of the platform he took out his gunblade and used it to wave lazy circles in the air.

A taunt for the two small pacifists, who'd never be allowed any weapons of their own. Fujin had tensed up next to her brother, full of rage to see it. Before Raijin could stop her she was off down the steps, ready to confront Seifer, giving him one hard shove so that he toppled - laughing, because of course he was laughing; Zell couldn't ever remember a Seifer who didn't delight in provoking people - off the platform and onto the solar panel. Fujin gave a shout of rage and jumped down after him, as though she'd been looking for an excuse to pummel someone for years, which, of course, she had.

But when Raijin caught up to them outside there was very little pummeling going on. Seifer stood swinging his blade aimlessly in the center of a blue panel, the light reflected from it making his hair gleam. He seemed very cheerful at having prodded Fujin into rage. He said, "You a plains girl?" with no small amount of interest.

He'd thought, he explained, that they were all dead: the plains people. And Fujin hadn't looked like a plains girl when he'd seen her from far off - albino, was she? Weird. Well, he'd made Cid bring him along because there were supposed to be plains people here; the Card Queen had said so, and the Card Queen knew everybody and had done everything: she'd even played a sorceress in a movie once.

"I'll bet you hate sorceresses," Seifer had said, pointing a finger at Fujin defiantly.

Raijin, coming up behind her, had said, "Well, we don't exactly like 'em, ya know?"

Hate wasn't really encouraged in FH. But it was a sorceress - Adel - who had destroyed Fujin and Raijin's people. A sorceress and her Knight.

"You're definitely from the plains," was all Seifer had said, staring at Raijin approvingly. Seifer was tall for his age, but Raijin was taller, and Seifer, instead of being fazed by this, appeared to find this fitting, entirely correct. He'd wanted a massive dark tribesman of old, and now he'd found one. Seifer liked it when the world met his romantic expectations.

So he sat down there in the middle of the path, easy and at home, and balanced his blade on his knee. Fujin and Raijin blinked down at him, befuddled.

"Whaddya know about the Knight Kazamai?" Seifer asked them, without preamble. "I've been everywhere asking about her - about all of them, really, but she's the one nobody can tell me about. Cid let me go off on my own for the summer for the first time last year, and I hitched all the way to Deling. But nobody there knows anything about her. Nobody in the West knows anything about her, period. She was from the plains, ya know."

"We...know?" Raijin said, confused to be confronted by a gunblade-wielding ancient history enthusiast, and even more confused to be on the receiving end of a 'ya know.'

"She served Wren Seervayne," Seifer continued, as though he hadn't spoken. "The sorceress. Sorcerer, really, but you know the convention. They're all sorceresses; the only one we call 'him' is Hyne. Oh-" he added, at Fujin and Raijin's continued stares, "I'm not religious. What's the point, anyway? People thinkin' Hyne'll come back to punish us all in the end for turning away from him, developing our own minds. But I just- I like Knights, that's all. I collect 'em."

"'EM?" repeated Fujin, crossing her arms skeptically. She seemed annoyed. She seemed to have enjoyed an excuse to tackle Seifer. But now that she was standing next to him it was clear that he'd maybe let himself be tackled, in order to have a reason to talk to her. Seifer, of course, couldn't initiate conversation like a normal person. He had to do it in the most attention-seeking, bullying way possible.

"Knights," Seifer said again, like he thought Fujin was a little slow. "People don't like 'em much. Well, I do. Not Kerr, though," he added hastily, bringing his hands up. "Actually Wardegrave's my favorite. You know Wardegrave?"

Fujin gave a huff of annoyance in response. But Raijin felt a little bad for Seifer. Raijin was a good kid, a conscientious kid, a true FH fisherkid at heart. And something in him understood then that this lean blond boy, his cheeks oddly hollowed, his demeanor making him seem bigger than he was, seemed to be trying to be impressive. And for the most part he was succeeding: it wasn't difficult to be more impressive than an FH resident; the national costume of FH was tatty shorts and secondhand waterproof boots.

He didn't wait for them to tell him that of course they knew Wardegrave (everybody knew Wardegrave; that was the first-ever Knight, duh; even Zell knew Wardegrave). Instead he launched into a description of the work some historians had been doing at Deling City University to try and figure out Wardegrave's fighting style; did they know? There had been excavations done, oh, some fifteen years ago now, and they'd dug up all these skeletons from the earth: stocky, powerful skeletons that had to be Ancient Centran. And they'd been able to look at the bones and at old frescoes and vases and things and they'd figured out how these guys must've held their blades-

"Like this," Seifer had demonstrated then, arranging himself purposefully into the stance that Zell, years later, would think of as uniquely his. But it wasn't uniquely his, apparently, and anyway back then he didn't manage to hit it with the kind of grace he'd have later on. He looked more determined than imposing.

But then Fujin and Raijin had never known someone their age to look even close to imposing. They'd never known anyone to have a signature fighting stance, or at least not anyone who wasn't automatically classified as a threat to their peaceful home: a source of fear for Raijin and hopeless, impotent anger for Fujin. But Seifer, who would later loom as one of the greatest threats Zell had ever known, then inspired none of that. The more he talked, demonstrated poses he'd excavated from old books and studies, outlined fantastic stories...

"Now, the sorceress Eeya, she'd take people's heads. Girls' heads, I mean. She'd keep all the heads all locked up in her base and then swap 'em out for her own, and when she'd put on a new one she'd get their memories, their powers, their way of thinking. Well, it's a metaphor, but I think-"

...the more it became clear that he really just wanted to talk to somebody about this stuff.

_He's lonely_, Raijin had thought then.

And, horribly, Zell had to concur. He didn't want to concur. Who wanted to feel bad for Seifer Almasy? Seifer was an asshole, and even if he hadn't been the worst kid in the world, that hadn't stopped him from turning into a truly shitty adult. But Zell had always looked up at him from far below. In his worst memories, Seifer was already an older cadet, established at Garden and in the DC, too cool for his cadet uniform, sneering down at junior classman Zell for some minor infraction. In Zell's hazy childhood dreams, Seifer was the orphanage kid who was too big and rough to really play with, too tough to consider Zell anything but an annoyance, the secret orchestrator of all those midnight bonfires that the others had never wanted to invite Zell to.

But in Raijin's memories he was just a defiant, passionate, weird kid. Who talked about Knights like he was afraid that if he stopped, then he'd lose people's attention and then they wouldn't want to listen to him at all.

"KAZAMAI," Fujin said, interjecting then.

"-what?" Seifer said, annoyed. He pointed his blade at Fujin, clearly more for show than anything else, since if he was going to attack them he could have done it at any point. He said, "Listen, don't interrupt me. I don't like it when people talk over me," with a healthy trace of the arrogance that would someday dominate his entire personality. Zell was weirdly glad to see it; it reminded him that he didn't actually like Seifer, not even this tempered, embryonic Seifer that had meaning for Raijin, somewhere in the future.

But, in the past, not yet meaning for Fujin. Weird. Fujin had always been Seifer's biggest fan. But now she - skinny, small, completely non-imposing and an FH pacifist to boot - tapped her foot in irritation like she thought she could bully Seifer of all people into shutting up and said again, "KAZAMAI."

"You wanted to know about her, ya know?" Raijin said, because he was used to translating for Fujin. "Fujin wants you to get to the point."

Seifer scowled. "The point is that nobody records these people right. Knights, I mean. Even Wardegrave - people say he had a second Knight serving next to him. But no one tells you who or why. They-they were big, the Knights. Fighters. And people are so scared of 'em they'd just rather forget what made 'em great," he complained. "Especially if they aren't from Galbadia or Dollet. I mean if they can't be used like puppets to show why Vinzer Deling's a good ruler. But they shouldn't be used that way; they're not puppets. They're the only people to really think for themselves. They're not afraid of magic, even if everybody else is."

This was certainly true, but Raijin (and Zell) privately thought that people had good reason to be afraid of magic. Magic - sorceress magic, anyway - rarely brought anybody anything good. Even Kazamai had been-

"KILLED," Fujin said dismissively.

"Sooner or later, Knights get killed," Raijin said. "Kinda weird that you like 'em so much, ya know? Sooner or later they just end up dyin'."

But Seifer had just sheathed his blade, folded his arms around himself, and done something Zell had seen him do often: he'd laughed. More than a little derisively, too. The classic Seifer Almasy laugh: private and public at the same time; private because it seemed to say he knew something you didn't, public because he wanted to make sure you were aware of that.

"Sooner or later," Seifer said, stretching out his hands grandiosely, "Everyone ends up dyin'. But me? I wanna do something big before I go. Something everybody's gonna have to pay attention to. I-" and here he brought up one thumb and jerked it back to point at himself, theatrical. "-I'm gonna be a Knight."

_Yeah, tell us about it, you psycho_, Zell thought, glad to finally get to the crux of him. This was Seifer Almasy. This guy. This horrible, arrogant, crazy-

"DEAL," Fujin said in response.

_-deal?_ Zell thought, confused.

"Fujin wants to make a deal with you, ya know?" Raijin translated.

"I got that; I'm not a moron," Seifer said dismissively. "Alright. What is it? And why?"

Fujin held up a hand to stall him, then turned and shoved her brother back to the platform to confer. Raijin accepted this. She'd always been the stronger-willed of the two, and he accepted most of what she threw at him. Besides, he understood her. Fujin was, deep down, a very frightened person. It was FH that had done it to her. Safe, easygoing FH was a nice place to live in. People cared about them here. People treated them well.

But Fujin thought it came with an expiration date. Everything did. Everything died. And, to go by what had happened to the plains, to the father they'd never known, to their people, sometimes they died in horrible ways, sometimes they were killed off. FH's pacifist principles weren't enough to make up for this awful truth. In fact, sometimes Fujin seemed to forget them entirely. Dobe would lecture her, and the lecture would enter her mind and leave it soon after; she'd blink blankly at her brother like he was a moron whenever he would try to bring it up, to remind her that in FH they lived non-violently.

She thought that was stupid. In other places, people could fight back. In Timber they were fighting back - everyone there was reported to be part of a rebel faction, and no matter how many people Vinzer Deling threw in prison, there were always others willing to organize and strategize in their place. In Dollet, the descendants of the old Nah had their own warlike customs, their own ways of resisting Galbadian supremacy. Even Balamb had its fighters, grizzled old men who'd once fought in the Adel War and who'd retired their guns but still championed town militias, demanded that the young people learn to defend themselves.

_Yeah. My granddad was like that. He taught me that. You've gotta anticipate the worst. Learn to fight. Not to hurt people. But because you can't be defenseless in life. And because you're gonna find sometimes that there are things worth defending,_ Zell thought, finding strange common ground with Fujin of all people.

"He'll teach us to fight," Fujin told her brother in a low voice. "Look at him. He's not gonna listen to Dobe. And if his teacher is giving us work then he might be here for a while."

Raijin stared at her. Over her shoulder, Seifer Almasy stood, squinting at them in the sunlight and swinging his blade. Behind Seifer was the large shining inverted dome of the panel, the junk tracks of the city, the master fisherman at his post, a whole glittering blue sea of peaceful living.

"He'll teach you, ya know?" Raijin corrected. "I'm gonna be a fisherman. The master fisherman said it's—"

"UNLIKELY," commented Fujin.

"Yeah, but not impossible," said Raijin. "He didn't say impossible; he just said unlikely. I mean, I'm not the best, but I choose to keep up hope, ya know?"

Fujin scowled and shoved him. He stumbled, more to absorb the hit than because it hurt, and let her stalk back to Seifer, confer with him. However she put the deal to Seifer, it made him grin. He laughed again and started sketching something strangely in the air with his blade. When Raijin made it back to them this turned out to be the terms of the deal: highly specific terms, which Fujin hadn't asked for.

"One, finding your weapons. Shouldn't be hard. He can just pick up a stick and hit things, really. He's huge—"

"I don't want to hit things," Raijin protested.

"Quiet," said Seifer.

"QUIET," said Fujin.

"And in exchange you have to tell me what you know about Kazamai's weapons. That's fair. Two. You'll need to start with the basic training manuals. Everybody does. Not the rules like no drill practice in the cafeteria, obviously, that doesn't apply. But—"

And he was again off, outlining what sounded like a four-year training plan for the pair of them: Seifer Almasy's patented fighting lessons, although naturally most of what he said wasn't his at all: it was just everything he'd learned from Cid. He'd now pass it on for the chance to learn more about one of his idols. Zell reflected that it must have seemed like a good trade to him. Cid had always liked Seifer just fine; maybe even liked him a little more than he did some of the other cadets. And Seifer had always seemed to get on fine with Cid, to defer to him a little more easily than he did to other people. But the Seifer of the future had proven that he held no real loyalty to Garden, so obviously it meant nothing to just reveal all the training maneuvers, easily let slip how one could build any weapon, from a simple gun to even a complex chakram blade - he liked that one; he liked the complex ones - or in fact anything at all, with the right equipment.

In the past, as in Zell's present, Seifer was willing to toss away all that Garden had given him, if it meant getting back some slip of Knighthood. Which was nothing. A bunch of old stories. Some long-dead bullies. That was all.

_…You are so fucking weird_, Zell thought.

And initially Fujin and Raijin had felt the same. Seifer was weird. He had a perfectly serviceable guardian, one who allowed him to fight and everything. But he chose to ignore that guardian, even though Cid seemed very nice to Fujin and Raijin, and very invested in Seifer. Seifer had been brought along on Cid's little excursion presumably to interest him in the running of Garden. He, Cid, and Xu stayed at the hotel, and every morning Cid tried to get him to come talk to the engineers, play nice with Mayor Dobe, learn about how to maneuver the Garden.

"It's said that once the Garden was able to fly!" said Cid.

And Xu said, "If it ever flies again, we'll need a pilot. I can be a pilot. I can do that. The piloting, I mean."

And Seifer said, "Huh."

Cid seemed to be grooming Seifer. He puffed along next to Seifer and discussed, loftily, what it was to be Headmaster, and how it meant you had to meet all kinds, lead all kinds, talk to people, learn what to give and when and where ("I'm taking notes on this!" said Xu, a pen in one hand and a pad in the other, and was largely ignored), and sometimes even make a below-the-table deal or two.

But the only deal Seifer was interested in was the one that would bring him closer to his dream. Invariably he would slip away, leaving Cid looking after him, an unreadable expression on his face. And then Seifer would head with Fujin and Raijin to one of the more deserted spots of FH – to the abandoned train cars outside the mayor's house, or to the creepy, graffitied train depot. He would put them through their paces there, where the residents of FH were less likely to see. And all the while he would talk.

"Look, I'm not saying they were all exciting," he'd say, lying back on the abandoned tracks with his arms crossed behind his head, while Fujin and Raijin sparred, sweating their way through all thirty-three Garden-approved defensive stances in the hot sun. "Vasko Phipps literally became a Knight by accident. He was really the on-site doctor on the trans-oceanic – the trans-oceanic was the train that used to run along this rail, from Timber to Esthar-"

"We know it was, ya know?" Raijin said, panting with exertion.

"LIVE ON IT," said Fujin, annoyed.

Seifer waved a hand lazily at them and kept talking. "But Torval Vertigris was something. Not nice, but something. He collected eyes. Would've liked yours—" he pointed at Fujin here. She still had both eyes, and they were nice enough, with her bright bindi making their color seem less strange. "—red. Unusual. I think Xu's jealous. She was gettin' all soppy with Cid about how cute you are and how nice this place is—" he rolled his eyes. "Anyway. Vertigris. Since he was raised by Tonberries—"

_That's ridiculous. They would have knifed him_, Zell thought.

"RIDICULOUS," said Fujin.

"They woulda knifed him, ya know?" said Raijin.

Seifer raised himself up on his elbows and stared at them. He didn't say anything for a minute, but then his face took on a scornful look and he said, "You're as bad as Xu, as bad as most people. Well, I've got no time for people who only see what's obvious to them. I want dreamers. Believers. Like me."

Then he stood up and strode off, hauling himself onto the abandoned train platform and walking out of sight. Fujin and Raijin stopped and watched him go.

"So he only makes friends with nutcases, ya know?" Raijin said, after a minute, when he thought Seifer must be out of earshot. "Knight-obsessed nutcases."

Fujin laughed and nodded. "SO NO ONE," she said.

"Yeah, I bet he hasn't got anybody, ya know?" Raijin said. And they went back to sparring.

But when Seifer didn't come back after a few more minutes, Fujin raised an eyebrow at Raijin and went to the edge of the platform. He followed. They peered over it. Seifer was a little ways off, examining a draw point.

FH had quite a few draw points, like everywhere else did. No one ever used them. Magic wasn't something they needed, and so these strange natural wonders, cropping up even in the heart of the technological junk pile, went largely ignored. But Seifer crouched in front of this one, entranced by the play of light, and when they came close he said, "Now, if you wanna fight for real, this is what you need." He spread out an arm grandiosely as he said it. But his voice wasn't in it. There was something a little bitter to it. Fujin and Raijin said nothing, unsure how to react. Seifer always seemed to want to convince them that he had a dangerous, mercurial bent, with his gunblade-waving, his barks of sudden laughter. But he'd never really been convincing until now, because generally there was no bitterness in him.

_Yet_, Zell thought, with sudden clarity. _Not yet. That's—that's what makes this one so different. The Seifer_ I _know… He's got more rot in him than this one._

"I do have a friend, by the way," Seifer told them coolly.

Fujin and Raijin looked at each other, caught out.

"His name is Squall, and he's littler than you, and he could still wipe the floor with both of you," Seifer said.

It was a taunt. It made Fujin flush and look angry. But Raijin only felt guilty, for being cruel about him, and also a little embarrassed, because he assumed Seifer was lying.

_He's not_, Zell thought. _Or at least he's not lying about Squall existing, or being able to take you both on. But calling Squall a friend?_

It wasn't that it was impossible. Zell realized that it was absolutely possible. From what he could recall of the Orphanage, Seifer had liked Squall more than he'd ever liked him, at least. He and Squall had fought, sure, but only because Seifer fought with everyone. And those fights had never been as heated, intense, or cruel as they later became. Maybe he and Squall had been friends once.

It was just a weird thought to contemplate.

"SQUALL?" Fujin asked skeptically.

"Yeah," Seifer said, turning away from her dismissively and sitting down to continue studying the draw point. "I wanted to bring him along, but Cid said no. Cid wants him to work through the summer. He's gotta get stronger, Cid says. He's not strong enough."

"SAID OTHERWISE."

"You said he could take us, ya know?"

"He can!" Seifer said defensively. "He's still a Junior Classman, but only because he scored two points less than me on the Spring exam, which was still the third-best score. But Cid says it's no good – one high score's fine for me, but—" He shifted uncomfortably. "Squall's different. Cid's already started him on GFs. Squall can draw and everything."

He said this last bit matter-of-factly, not enviously, which was strange. Zell would have expected him to be envious. Seifer hated being behind at things, hated being judged less than people: you could see it in him. He would nod, clap, give you your due. But there would be a brittle quality to him when he next spoke to you, a sign that he might break off mid-congratulations and start making fun of you instead, making it impossible for you to enjoy your victory.

But now he spoke tonelessly. He said, "Cid wants me to be Headmaster some day. But he's got other plans for Squall."

Fujin and Raijin looked at eachother. The bit about Cid wanting him to be Headmaster certainly sounded true enough. Maybe the stuff about Squall wasn't just a desperate attempt to stave off embarrassment. Gingerly, they both came closer to Seifer, Fujin looking a tiny bit sorry, Raijin feeling more apologetic than ever. Seifer ignored them.

He kept speaking. "He won't tell me what his plans are, but I know he has 'em. He treats Squall like—like Squall's gonna vanish someday, maybe, and not come back, like there's somethin' waiting to get him and nothing Squall does can prepare him enough for it. It's makin' Squall weird. Some days he trains and trains and comes back and acts like he doesn't even _know_…"

He trailed off. Fujin and Raijin looked at each other, at a loss for what to do. Raijin again considered that Squall might be imaginary, and wondered if maybe Seifer had dreamed Squall up to be a smokescreen. Maybe he was really telling them about his own life. Maybe he was the one who had to train and train, and maybe he was resentful about that. Even though, really, Cid Kramer seemed like such a nice man.

"Cid seems to like you, though, ya know?" Raijin put in gently.

Seifer gave him a withering look. "Cid likes me," he said flatly, "Because Cid thinks he's gonna keep me. He's thought that for a while. That he'll lose Squall, but me he can keep. I can stay at Garden and build his dream. But I'm not going to!"

He stood and did something completely perplexing. He jabbed out a hand at the draw point – very dangerous, since sometimes they could burn very hot or go icy cold, with dire results to the person touching them every time – and let the purple light wash over his arm. When he brought it back he seemed almost disappointed to find that the arm was still whole. He said, in a savage rush, "Here's what people are like at Garden. I mean the SeeDs. They're boring. They're not moral. They're just conventional. They're not loyal. They're just dutiful. They're not courageous. They just followers. They're not imaginative. They're just superstitious. They're not _just_. They're just well-decorated.

"Cid doesn't want them to be anything else," he finished, and his voice broke off, a little, and Raijin had the strange thought that maybe Seifer, like Fujin, didn't like where he was from very much.

Evidently Fujin thought the same. She sat next to him, cross-legged, like she was planning on settling in, and she said, apropos of nothing, "THANK YOU."

For what? Sharing something with them? Making up a friend named Squall? Raijin, for all that he had the bigger heart and was probably fonder of Seifer than Fujin was, was a little more dubious about sitting down next to Seifer so easily when he was behaving so unpredictably. But he followed Fujin's lead after a moment and sat down, too. There was silence. The silence bothered Raijin; he wasn't sure where they could go from here.

"So. Squall, ya know? Sounds like you're concerned about him, ya know?"

Seifer looked at him directly as though about to confirm this, but then changed his mind and shrugged. "He's started forgetting stuff. We grew up together. I remember; he forgets. It doesn't make sense. He's younger than me, though. It could be normal."

"Yeah, yeah," said Raijin agreeably. "Well, Fujin's younger than me too, ya know? And she forgets stuff all the time. Like when our dad talks about living without fighti—mmmfgh!"

Fujin had smacked him in the head.

"Well, you _do_ forget, ya know?" Raijin protested, as Seifer doubled over with laughter. "I mean, it's not your fault, ya know? You're forgetful. And it's not like you don't know it. Remember how you swore you had a friend only you could hear that was takin' all Dobe's lectures out of your head? That was weird, ya know?"

"RAGE," said Fujin, and moved in for the kill again. But by now Seifer had recovered and he caught her arm. Raijin shot him a grateful look.

"I don't think it's the same," Seifer said pensively. "It could be because he's young. But I've got a theory about it, too. It didn't start until he—"

Seifer stopped, staring at Fujin. He reached out one slim finger and did something odd. He poked at the ornament just below her right eye. Fujin, dumbfounded, didn't think to attack him right away. Then she recovered.

"RUDE!" she said, and moved to launch herself at Seifer. This time Raijin did the intercepting.

But Seifer did something Zell had never seen him do. He held up his hands, palms forward. Surrender.

"Can I see it? Your bindi-thing?" he said, as though he hadn't just very literally prodded Fujin into fury. Fujin's turn to give a withering look.

"NO," she said.

"I'm not gonna keep it," Seifer said. "I just wanna see it. You can—" he grimaced, as though he didn't want to say any more, but felt he had to, "—you can hold my gunblade while I look it over. We'll trade. You don't have to give it back until I give you back what's yours."

Fujin looked at him mistrustfully. But Hyperion gleamed at his side, enticingly sharp and dangerous and completely unlike anything she'd ever been allowed to touch before. Raijin knew before she said yes that she'd agree, and watched over the trade somewhat warily, as Fujin took the sharp object with no small amount of glee, and Seifer examined the bright multicolored jewel.

"It's called Hyperion," Seifer muttered, turning Fujin's ornament over in his hands. "After the poem. You know, the one about Wardegrave. 'Fanatics have their dreams, wherewith they weave.' 'By the bright Hyperion, his flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels.'"

Fujin, for her part, delightedly tried a few experimental swings of the blade, leaving her brother jumping back and wincing, worrying she'd cut herself.

"NAME IS—" she began, presumably about to compliment Seifer on selecting such a poetic title for his blade, now that she and Seifer's topsy-turvy love-hate relationship was momentarily back to love.

"It's alright," Seifer said perplexingly. "You don't need to tell me. I can ask it myself."

Fujin stopped swinging and stared at him, confused. Raijin stopped dodging the gunblade and did the same. Neither of them knew what he was talking about.

Zell did. It came to him as Seifer lifted the ornament to his face, apparently decided that he would look ridiculous with a gemstone beneath his eye, and simply settled for holding it tightly in his palm. He closed his eyes for a moment, as though he were focusing hard on something, exerting his will.

Will. Proximity and will. That was all it took.

_It's a GF Manifest_, Zell realized.

And Seifer, grinning, confirmed it. Having junctioned, he reached out his hand to the draw point again, ignoring Raijin's warning shout, and whispered a command. The purple light streamed out into blueish-white, and his face glowed momentarily. He took on the new magic. When he opened his eyes again, he looked satisfied.

"Pandemona," he said, handing the ornament back to Fujin. "That's her name, right? Your GF?"

Fujin and Raijin stared at him. He used their momentary surprise to take his gunblade back easily.

"GF?" Fujin said dumbly.

"What are you talking about, ya know?" Raijin asked. "That's not a—Pandemona was her imaginary friend, ya know? But she's not real. She's not a—a—"

"GF!" Fujin said, holding her ornament in front of her like it was going to bite her.

"You didn't know?" Seifer said. "Well. Now you know. You've had power at your fingertips this whole time. You can draw. And cast. You know that, right? You shouldn't tell anybody you can do it, though. Somebody might take it from you, and hurt you over it. Even Cid's real weird about GFs; we're supposed to bring all the ones we find to him. So keep it a secret when you're not around me or your brother. But you should start using her. She'll make you stronger. You just need to junction. Here. I'll teach you how."

And then he did. And Raijin thought that maybe he would demand extra for it, would refuse to help Fujin learn unless she told him a million new tales about Kazamai (which would be a problem, because he and Fujin only remembered about three, and had by now begun making things up in order to fulfill their end of the deal), but Seifer didn't do that. Instead he devoted the next week and half to going over junctioning with them, without asking for anything more than the deal's original terms, and so after a while they began, in spite of themselves, to like him.

He kept a lookout at all the town's draw points while Fujin happily drew new magic, and thuggishly bullied away the locals if he had to. He started actually sparring with the Dobe siblings – it was fairer now, he said, since they could junction the GF to hold him off. And he started to tell his Knight stories _to_ them instead of _at_ them. It was no longer an impassioned recitation that didn't account for his audience. Now he actually seemed to care if they were interested or not, and began to cater to their interests, expounding on the great warrior Jana Ki for Fujin, the loyal Tenoch Yahuitl for Raijin. His obsession was still weird, but now it was less something he was using purely to define himself, and more a genuine interest he wanted to share.

So, while Cid and Mayor Dobe and Xu made plans for Garden, and the pacifist engineers traveled in shifts to Balamb town to – perversely – add the finishing touches to the greatest military school the world had ever known, the not-yet-Disciplinary Committee got to know each other, laughing and sparring in the hidden corners of the junk pile.

But one day Xu found them.

It wasn't the sparring that bothered her. In fact, she wasn't even bothered by that. She walked right past Fujin and Seifer mid-fight, Fujin sparing a glance at her and then nodding at Seifer to show that she understood, someone else was here, no magic could be cast. In response, Seifer eased up on his attacks and began to just bat at her, really, light taps. Raijin, sitting watching them from the train platform, thought it looked strange. He'd grown used to seeing them both in a very graceful light: Fujin standing ramrod straight, at attention, casting powerful spells; Seifer in his pose cribbed from Wardegrave, somehow making it his own.

Xu nodded at Raijin as she passed. Raijin nodded back. Then he put her out of his mind right away; he found her nice enough, if somewhat intense.

There was a sharp inhalation of breath behind him. Raijin turned around. Xu was examining the platform's draw point.

It gave off blue-white light. Fujin had drawn from it this morning. Xu said, very calmly, and in a low voice, "I didn't take the magic from this today."

Raijin felt uneasy. He looked over at Seifer and his sister, still sparring. He slid noiselessly to the train tracks below in order to go warn them. He shouldn't have. There was no point.

"Seifer!" Xu shouted.

Seifer stopped sparring. He shouldered his blade and looked over at Xu, vaguely annoyed.

"What?" he said.

"You little cheat!" said Xu.

Seifer looked perplexed. So did Fujin. Raijin, standing in the shadow of the platform where Xu couldn't see him, waved his hands in a panic and mouthed, _It's white. The draw point's white. She knows._

Fujin stared at him, befuddled. But Seifer got it. He ran to the platform and pulled himself up to face Xu.

"You absolute liar!" Xu said. "You drew from this, didn't you?"

Fujin opened her mouth to protest. Before she could, Seifer shrugged and said, "Maybe I did. So what?"

Xu stared at him, coolly assessing. "So you're in violation. Cid hasn't cleared you for GFs yet. And you've spent all this time pretending you didn't want one. I thought it was suspicious. Now I know why. You weren't supposed to take the Spring exam with a GF—"

"I didn't," Seifer said quickly.

"Oh, please," Xu said. "You scored two points above everyone else in your group, cadets and Junior Classmen alike. That's not normal. Those exams are gamed. Everyone in the same cohort is supposed to get the same score; Cid's designed them that way."

"Trepe got one point below me," Seifer said.

"Yes, but she's a blue mage!" said Xu. "You—you're using a GF behind Garden's back-"

"So snitch on me and go away," Seifer snapped. "You found me out. Fine. But I'm busy right now. I'm not gonna fight with you about it."

"I'm not going until you give me that GF," Xu said.

Seifer shifted uncomfortably. He didn't have the GF; Fujin did. So he just shrugged again, then held out his arms and said, loudly, "No."

Xu reached for her belt and snapped open her whip. "I'll take it if you don't give it to me!"

"You haven't even learned how to draw one yet," Seifer scoffed. "The technique's different, and it's above your level. You've gotta have the magical experience to teleport the Manifest, and nobody in _your_ cohort has any idea how to do that. Not even teacher's pets like you."

To her credit, Xu didn't even dignify that with a verbal response. She just attacked him. They moved very quickly, far more quickly than Seifer moved when he sparred with Fujin, just a whirl of metal and leather on the platform, Seifer supplementing his attacks with some kind of chi, and Xu hers with liberal use of magic. Xu soon had the upper hand; Seifer could singe her, but she could poison him, and it became clear soon enough that her methods were more effective. Fujin, still on the tracks, gave a cry and came running up. Before Raijin could stop her, she'd vaulted up to the platform and joined the fray.

"What are you—" Seifer said, nearly failing to block one of Xu's attacks as he caught sight of Fujin. "No! Go away. She's junctioning right now. She has a GF with her, and that GF can sense—"

It could sense magic. It could sense its fellows. And sense it did. Xu turned her attention to Fujin and said, a second later, "_You_ have the GF."

She backed off of Seifer at once, and left him panting on the platform, patting himself down for an antidote. Raijin, worried for him, climbed up to the platform himself and helped him look. When it seemed he didn't have an antidote, Raijin began liberally dousing him with his potion store, just to stave off his imminent collapse. Seifer seemed annoyed by this waste of potions, but submitted to it.

"Give it to me," Xu told Fujin.

"NO," Fujin scoffed. "MINE."

""It's not yours; it's not anybody's," said Xu. "GFs are for the taking."

"It's hers, Xu," Seifer called out, still looking for an antidote. "Leave her alone."

"You should have taken it from her and given it to Cid," said Xu. "Those are our orders. Those are everybody's orders."

"I don't like those orders!" Seifer said.

"Well, too bad for you," said Xu coolly. "Because we don't get to pick and choose."

And she held out her hand to Fujin and repeated, "Give. It. To. Me."

And Fujin said, very calmly, "No. It's. Mine."

Xu flushed. She said, "I don't want to do this, but you don't leave me any choice," and attacked again. She didn't pummel Fujin with spells, though. She didn't want to beat Fujin, the way she'd wanted to with Seifer. She just wanted the GF. So she took it. But she didn't do what Seifer had said she would; she didn't draw it. She was too young; she didn't know how. Instead she just took the Manifest, leveling her whip at Fujin's right eye and ripping it all – the skin, the lashes, the jeweled ornament – clear away.

Raijin watched, horrified. It happened all at once, and yet almost too slowly for all that. His sister gave a horrified shriek, blood arced up from her face, and Xu, looking a little shocked at the effects of what she'd just done, darted forward and grabbed the bloody gem, then darted back to where Seifer was and hissed, "Give me a potion." Raijin pushed past her savagely, so that she stumbled and fell on the platform, and ran to Fujin. She was on the floor. The right side of her face was covered in blood. Raijin moaned in horror to see it. Fujin didn't make any noise at all.

Behind him he heard Xu say again, frantically this time, sounding scared, "Give me a potion! I don't have any cure spells. So give me a potion. She has to have a potion right now, or she'll lose the eye!"

And Seifer said, after a horrible moment of silence, "I don't have any potions anymore. I used them all because you poisoned me."

Somehow, the rest of that day was gone from Raijin's memory. Maybe it had been too traumatic. Maybe he'd given it away in a rare moment when he'd junctioned, not wanting to keep it. Or maybe he'd just passed out from horror. Either way, his life blacked out right then, abruptly stopped short with the vision of his sister covered in blood, and the next thing he and Zell both knew, he was opening his eyes on his cot in the Mayor's House, and his sister was sitting above him, looking alive, free of blood, grim-faced, and one-eyed.

Upstairs, in the sun room, Cid Kramer and Mayor Dobe were arguing loud enough for them to hear.

"You want us to reward you for maiming a child!" Dobe roared.

"They're all children; they don't know any better," Cid said.

"Which is all the more reason for them not to fight!" Dobe said.

"Oh, please," said Cid. "You've helped us build Garden now; you can't tell me that you're so squeamish about our aims—"

"Helped you with the express agreement that if we did so, you and your people would never bring violence to Fisherman's Horizon!"

"And now I want to take violence away!" Cid said. "I'm not taking the GF because I want to punish her! It's brought you nothing but pain, and it's made to hurt people. So let us have it. If we have it, it really can never be used against you again."

There was a moment's silence. Raijin looked at his sister. She looked even paler than usual. She looked horrible.

"Fine," Mayor Dobe said, in a tight voice.

"Good," came Cid's voice, laced with relief. "Now about the plans to build below B-Level. I think—"

"We won't be doing any more building for you," said Mayor Dobe. "Get the hell out of my house."

Cid protested loudly. Mayor Dobe remained firm. Their tones crept up, up, up again, harsher and angrier than ever.

"Fujin," Raijin whispered, not caring about the fight, only caring about his sister. "Fuu, they're taking—"

"He was right," Fujin said slowly. "He said they would take it and try to hurt me. GFs are…they're like anything else. If you have something: a GF, a peaceful life, a good life. It doesn't matter. You have to be able to defend it. Because otherwise people will take it from you."

Raijin stared at her with a sinking heart. His unhappy, warlike sister. Her worst nightmares, her lack of faith in people, now confirmed.

"But he didn't, ya know?" he told Fujin. "Not everyone's like—I mean. Seifer's not like that. Seifer didn't try to take it from you."

"No," Fujin said, after a moment. "He didn't."

Cid came downstairs then, still cursing and calling Mayor Dobe a son of a bitch, and he only stopped when he saw them watching him. Immediately he looked contrite. Beneath the sound of Dobe yelling back at him – giving as good as he got for all his pacifist principles – Cid gave a sad smile and put his hands together and bowed his head at them.

"I really am sorry," he said quickly, more calmly than he'd been so far. "If you ever want her back – Pandemona, is what Seifer says her name is – then you need only come to Garden. I know your father disagrees with me on some things. But. It's the least I can do. There will always be a place for you at Garden. And as long as you're there, she'll be yours."

Then he was gone.

Fujin made up her mind then. And when Fujin made up her mind, Raijin made his up too. Zell saw Raijin very clearly: loyal. A loyal person, if not a terribly smart one. A smart person would have stayed in the peaceful junk pile, learned to be a fisherman. But then Raijin wasn't a fishing prodigy anyway, for all that he liked doing it. And he liked his sister more than he liked casting a line, and when he closed his eyes he saw her laid out in front of him on the train platform, covered in blood, and he worried about what might happen to her if he wasn't there to defend her, couldn't defend her.

They caught up with Seifer, Cid, and Xu halfway back to Timber. Xu saw them first and stopped, as if struck dumb, and seemed to want to say something. They ignored her, walking right past. Seifer was sitting on the rail with his back to the sea, shaking his head, and he didn't notice them at first.

"I don't want it," he was saying angrily. "I don't want to junction it. You stole it. It belongs to that girl, so I don't want it, and I don't want any of them!"

"Seifer," Cid said, bringing a hand to his crown and shaking his head. "Please. I don't want to have to discipline you."

Seifer snorted. "So let Xu do it," he taunted, making Xu flush red. "She wanted you to let her start – what was it? A Disciplinary Committee? Sounds like the kind of thing she'd like. Let her loose on the student body. See how may people she can take from by force—"

"SEIFER," Fujin said, cutting him off.

Seifer looked up and, catching sight of them, blinked in surprise. Cid turned around and broke into a grin.

"Well!" he said happily. "Well. Well, welcome. I didn't think we'd see you quite this soon." And, true to his word, he handed over a very familiar Manifest right away. Fujin took it and turned it over in her hands. She couldn't wear it where she used to – that was all still bandaged. Instead she tucked it into her shirt.

"We have to find you weapons," Cid said right away, thinking aloud. "Lots of good weapons to pick from. Obviously we assemble them ourselves for the cadets, though, and so there's a limit, you know in terms of expense and equipment. Seifer benefitted from being an early recruit, so he has a gunblade. And Xu was early too, so she got to take our last good whip—"

"I'm giving it up," Xu said quickly, behind Fujin and Raijin. Her voice was very unhappy. Fujin and Raijin still ignored her.

"They don't seem all that interested in whips," Seifer said, looking tensely from Fujin to Raijin. Cid had pressed something on him as he'd spoken to Fujin and Raijin. Another Manifest, as it turned out: some kind of pin. Frowning, he stuck it to his collar, as true to his word as Cid was.

"Oh, well, maybe we'll save that for Miss Trepe," Cid said quickly. "She was mentioning she wanted to switch over from throwing knives. We also have—"

"I'll just take a really big stick, ya know?" Raijin said, looking at Seifer.

"CHAKRAM," said Fujin, also looking past Cid to Seifer.

Seifer broke into a smile.

"My goodness," Cid said. "Decided already! That's what I like to see. I can tell you'll both settle in just fine." He clapped his hands together. "Well! Let's get going. We can get to know each other on the way, can't we? Yes, we can."

And so all of them – Cid, Seifer, Xu, Raijin, and Fujin – began the trek to Timber.

It was an awkward journey. Seifer seemed to want to say something to them, but couldn't seem to form the words, and Xu was worse, glancing at them anxiously before falling into step with Cid, just ahead, and valiantly pretending that they weren't there. Cid kept up a cheerful patter about beginner training techniques that Seifer had already taught them. Fujin and Raijin both ignored him.

Fujin touched Seifer's sleeve.

"THANK YOU," she said.

Seifer said, "For what?" a little carelessly, waving one arm as though to wipe away the thanks.

Fujin and Raijin looked at eachother, then back at him. Seifer said, a little arrogantly, "You oughtta stick by me at Garden. Some of those kids are real losers, but you're not so bad. We could be a—a posse. If you want."

"Us and you and Squall?" Raijin suggested.

Seifer blinked, as though he'd just forgotten something important, and couldn't believe he had. "Yeah," he said, after a minute. "Yeah. You and me and Squall. And Squall. Squall, too. A posse."

"What's that?" Cid said, turning around. "Are you three getting along already? Good! Good. Say. Seifer brought this up earlier, and you seem like good candidates. How would you three feel about heading up the Disciplinary Committee?"

He smiled brightly at them. He had a wonderful, fatherly smile.

* * *

Cid wasn't smiling in the present.

When they'd reached Edea's room in Trabia, she wasn't there.

"Edea…" Cid breathed out, like he couldn't quite figure out what had happened.

Fujin had thought he was smarter than that. There was a smear of blood on the hotel floor, and feathers on the bed, and a door with the lock ripped off, and no Edea to be found. It was cut-and-dry. Solving this mystery ought to have been easy, like taking a GF from a little girl.

Someone had kidnapped, possibly murdered, his wife.

"GONE," Fujin told Cid pitilessly. Cid was breathing hard. He stumbled and steadied himself on the wall.

Fujin regarded him dispassionately.

If she could have traded Edea to rescue Seifer and her brother, she would have done it gladly. But then something told her that this was all connected somehow anyway. She sniffed the air. It smelled like smoke and earth. Like down _there_. Fujin examined the doorframe. Dirt. Dirt all around. There were three slashes on the wall nearby, marks left by some careless weapon. Fujin traced them. She thought she knew which blade had put them there.

She knew the blade very, very well.

"Who's done this?" Cid asked the empty room. He ran a hand through his hair wildly. He looked agitated. He said, "And _how_? The hotel manager would have seen! Or heard, when she screamed for help! Who did this?"

Fujin wasn't sure she had screamed. She might even have invited her assailant in. Fujin traced the marks again. She said to herself, very low, "The bright Hyperion. His flaming robes streamed out beyond his heels."

* * *

A/N: Seifer inadvertently takes from Man and Superman when he complains about Garden, because I liked the line (though not Man and Superman. Go figure). &amp; the poem is a real poem because I write many things but I do not write good poems. I borrowed from _Hyperion_ so that you wouldn't have to deal with my attempts at poetry.


	14. Chapter 14

At this time, Irvine was in fairly medieval chains on a class-C Galbadian prison boat that smelled of sweat and fish and metal and was almost as old as the chains. Galbadia had rolled out the most theatrical equipment they had for him. Galbadian television crews had lovingly filmed his transport from the prison to the boat, the confiscation of his weapons and GFs last night, and even - to go by what Irvine's guards had been discussing - interviewed several prominent Deling City residents about the problem of SeeDs on the streets.

Xu was gonna be pissed.

This worsened his mood, which was already pretty bad. He'd spent a sleepless night being questioned, at that time without the film crews, with Bexley and the Galbadian interrogators threatening a torture they knew perfectly well they couldn't carry out under the current agreement. Irvine had opted to retreat inside his mind - weirdly empty, after they'd taken Siren - and ignore them.

There was the whole Hobbs Worth thing to consider instead. The Hobbs Worth thing became more and more peculiar the more he thought about it.

Obviously, they had to have been set up. They were being set up, and so was Worth, and Caraway was probably in on it, and all to hide a GF from Garden, which made no sense, because what single GF was so powerful that they had to go through all this trouble? Siren was a pretty decent GF: queen of boosting status ailments, capable of silencing any magic-user and making an even playing field a slightly more unfair fight. Irvine felt perfectly comfortable with her and no other GFs, an odd development given that many people tried to stockpile as many GFs as possible, but then he knew the risks.

But even Xu wouldn't have staged a massive fake raid just to keep Siren. Or for that matter even Eden.

Obviously, part of the Galbadians' aim was to discredit Garden. But in certain corners Garden was already discredited. Irvine knew that better than anybody. In Trabia and Balamb and Timber and Dollet, Garden was revered, honored, liked, even, depending on who you were talking to. But in Deling City? Among Caraway's own people? They were trash. You wore your cadet duds around school grounds because otherwise Martine would put the screws in and make you dig desert latrines for the army or something, but you took them off the second decent people might spot you. That you had ended up at Garden proved you were either from somewhere else, not a proper Deling person at all, or else you were the lowest rung of Deling society. Destined for the military, not able to get your education anywhere else, had to sell yourself to Martine's army pipeline to be worth a damn.

And Irvine already had a bad name just in and of himself, not connected to Garden in any way. So his being a sexual menace, or whatever they were selling, was hardly going to come as a surprise to anyone who happened to turn on the Deling City nightly news. Slandering him had to be an added perk. The real issue was that they'd stumbled onto something Caraway didn't want them to see, him and Rinoa and—

It took him a second to recall.

…Selphie? He'd bartered away the memory of Selphie for some reason; Siren had taken that memory. Then, while he wasn't looking, or maybe even at his instruction, Siren had taken his reasons for the bartering too. If Siren remembered doing this (which she probably wouldn't), then Irvine would have Words with her about it when she got back to him. And she would get back to him; his guards' vicious prods to get him below decks had suggested that Xu had demanded the return of both the GF _and_ the Seed – probably the GF first, if he knew Xu – and so Galbadia would reap no concrete rewards that these grunts could see, and they'd resolved to take it out on him.

Which was fine. Doctor K could heal the bruises. It was the memory lapse he was more concerned about. Now that sleep deprivation was making the edges of his brain very sharp, he worried that he'd lost some crucial detail, something necessary for unraveling the whole thing.

But, even more than that, he worried because it was Selphie. What could make him give her up? It made no sense. He'd never given her up. Not ever. Just lots of other people. Most people, really. Apparently at least one ex-girlfriend who had nudes. Why couldn't Siren have taken the moment when he'd figured _that_ out? Parts of that were still burned into his brain. Which was overtired, stressed, and desperately wanted a drink.

A soldier came down into the hold and hard jabbed at his temple to get his attention. This was probably in violation of something.

"We're here," said the soldier. "Get up. They're paying us some nice gil for you, at least."

Irvine gave an internal curse. Xu ran the budget with a fist closed tighter than an old Dolletian chastity belt. She hated the thought of Garden losing money. He was going to get the dressing down of his life. Possibly demoted. No. Definitely demoted. Maybe kicked out of Seed; it wasn't like they needed a sexual menace on the payroll. Which. He was mostly in SeeD to be with his friends, so whatever, he wouldn't much miss SeeD. But if he didn't have SeeD, where would he go? Even the residents of Fisherman's Horizon didn't seem to like him. The last time he'd been there, on their way to Esthar not long ago, he'd been hustled to the now-functioning train station by the hotel attendant and told point blank that he looked like a dangerous killer, please consider leaving.

The lack of sleep was turning his mind in weird directions. He shoved all that away and concentrated on making it up the ladder with the blinding sun beating down on him, his shackles making the trip difficult, the soldier prodding at him to go faster. When he made it to the deck he was hustled down a gangplank none-too-gently and then practically shoved at Xu.

Xu wasted no time. She strode forward to meet the Galbadians, demanded that they take the chains off of Irvine, take their money, give her Siren, and leave at once. Her hurry made more sense to Irvine a few moments later.

His shackles were off, he had an efficient cadet propping him, and they'd rounded the corner of the Balamb Hotel, with orders from Xu to report to Doctor K immediately. And there they were: the White SeeDs. Their ship was docked in the blue waters behind the hotel, tarps pulled low over it. This way the Galbadians wouldn't be able to identify them right away, if at all. This was sensible; the White SeeDs would want to initiate and control all contact with the Galbadians. They were unofficial allies with Timber and Esthar these days, some gambit of Matron's to try and make up for having almost handed world power to Deling City and also for being possessed by the woman who later ordered a Lunar Cry on Laguna's people. Only what were they doing in Balamb, on regular SeeD territory? And why was Quistis, talking to someone he couldn't see, visible on the deck of the ship when he craned his neck?

At first Irvine thought it was sleep deprivation combining with the glaring Balamb sun to play tricks on him. Hadn't Quistis gone to Centra? Had the other team come back with the White SeeDs? And so soon? Why? Irvine steadied himself with the cadet's arm, making her scowl at him, then stood up straighter to get a better look. Quistis wasn't alone. Zell was there, looking somehow defeated.

"'Scuse me," Irvine said, stumbling away from the cadet and changing course to the White SeeD ship.

"Hey! You need to get to the Infirmary!" said the cadet.

"Sure do," Irvine breathed out. He really did, too. He felt like he'd been chewed up and spat out, like he'd been devoured in battle, and that wasn't an offhand metaphor. Thanks to some offhand confuse spells that had been performed on his teammates once, he knew what that felt like for real – it was awful. You needed a curaga and maybe a nice nap in a tent afterwards, at least. But his friends were up there, apparently derailed from their mission just as he'd been derailed from his, and Zell, if possible, looked maybe as bad as Irvine felt. His hair hung limp over his face, his skin was clammy-seeming and pale, and his eyes were strangely flat. Something had happened. They might need help. Irvine wasn't going to ditch them; this wasn't the D-District, and he was a better person now; he didn't leave his friends to rot.

Or at least he thought he didn't. The missing memories of Selphie continued to spark a small riot in his brain. He had to have a good reason for that. Right?

"Yo. You look bad," Zell told him, when Irvine came up to the deck.

"I'd tell you the same," Irvine said, "But if I look any worse than you, I'd better hold it in. I'm gonna have to skate by on my charming personality from now on."

Zell, weirdly enough, didn't puff up and take offense at this. He just gave a tired nod, devoid of cheer, and turned up the corners of his mouth like he wanted to show he knew it was a joke, but he lacked completely the energy to do so. Which, for Zell, meant something had to be wrong. He and Quistis had been deep in discussion over something. Now they broke off and she said, "Irvine, what happened to you?"

"Prison," Irvine said shortly.

"What? Weren't you on a mission with Selphie? She didn't mention you'd been thrown in prison!" said Quistis.

"She didn't?" Irvine said, his heart sinking. Selphie was angry with him. They'd fought. Broken up, maybe. That was why he'd traded away the memory. Oh, Hyne. And it was probably his fault, too.

"Well, I'm not sure I gave her the time to," Quistis admitted sheepishly, after a moment.

"We were taken by Ellone," said Zell. "Me and Squall."

Irvine stared at him, befuddled by this new piece of information. Being taken by Ellone usually didn't leave people looking the way Zell looked. Irvine said this. Quistis said, "I was just thinking that, actually."

"I didn't tell you the whole story," Zell said, actually squirming under her stare. "Just the beginning."

"Well, that was interesting," she began, "But hardly useful. I mean, fine, maybe once he wasn't horrible—"

"Who?" Irvine cut in. "What's the story?"

Surprisingly, both Quistis and Zell sighed, like Irvine didn't know what he was signing up for.

"It's complicated. It doesn't even make sense to us," Quistis muttered. She had a book in her lap and now she rapped her knuckles against it, annoyed.

"It's a Hyne-damned enigma," Zell said. "Wrapped in a mystery, wrapped in an ugly grey coat that it thinks is cool."

Irvine blinked at them. Before he could ask for further clarification, Xu came up to the deck, trailed by some angry-looking White SeeDs and the cadet Irvine had abandoned back on Balamb soil. Xu pointed a finger at Zell.

"I'm taking 10,000 gil from your paycheck to cover ship repair," she told him. Zell, who was usually pretty respectful to Xu, just looked at her flatly and didn't say anything to appease her, didn't salute, didn't even complain. He worked his jaw. Xu raised an eyebrow, seemingly noting this, but didn't comment on it. Instead she rounded on Irvine.

"And you," she said, transferring the finger to him, "You need to get to the Infirmary now. In fact, you both look like you could use it!"

She packed them off with the cadet, staying behind herself to talk to Quistis. The trek to Garden was one of the worst Irvine had ever made in his life, and he was counting that time they'd lost their rental car and had to hike across wild monster territory from the Tomb of the Unknown King. Every inch of him hurt, he was tired, and he'd given away memories of his girlfriend and was worrying about it - a constant fearful worry in the back of his head. And he wasn't the only one. The longer Zell walked the more he looked ready to drop. He had to be sick or something. Sick and angry. Something about him was angry for some reason, something around his eyes. Zell was always emotional, so the anger wasn't so strange, but the way he wore it was: muted, taut, somehow drained by whatever was infesting him. Zell was usually both loud and aggressively healthy. But now he seemed pale and bitter and uncharacteristically listless. It fell to their beleaguered cadet escort to defeat most of the attacking caterchipillars on the way.

The overly-helpful cadet also saw them straight to the infirmary even though they tried to dismiss her about nine times. When she was gone, they both collapsed onto the fainting couch behind Kadowaki's desk. Irvine slumped forward and massaged his bruised wrists. Zell leaned back on his hands. Irvine eyed the infirmary bed from here, and snuck a glance at Zell to try and see if it would be rude to snatch it. Zell looked like he needed sleep as badly as Irvine did. But Zell was regarding the bed with a kind of horror, like just the thought of going to sleep was nauseating.

Not all nice dreams from Ellone this time, then.

The swish of the door announced Dr. K. She bustled in, a B-Garden staple, practically its mascot, kind and motherly and yet Garden-efficient for all that. Her kindness meant that Irvine could never really feel comfortable around her. At G-Garden they just threw potions at you and if that didn't fix you they wrote up a discharge letter; they didn't pretend to be your friend. But his level of trust here didn't matter, because he was going to get checked over whether he liked it or not. Dr. K pointed a finger at him.

"You first, Irvine," she said. "Haven't I told you to be more careful on missions?"

Had she? She probably had. He'd pulled a stint in Trabia in the second month after the war, trying to impress Selphie, and had ended up nearly buried under an unstable wall when it had collapsed. Dr. K had been there at around the same time and had to have patched him up, since the Trabian medical staff had mostly been dead at the time. But he couldn't remember more than that.

Dr. K took him behind her curtain, into the next room, giving Zell instructions to lie down and make himself comfortable. She checked Irvine, brusque and firm and perfectly Doctor-ly, not at all fazed to have the world's biggest pervert stripped down to a blue open-backed gown on her medical table. Then she had him dose himself with potions for some ailments, bound him up where the potions were going to discourage proper healing, and ordered him to put his shirt and pants back on. He did so and made to leave. She stopped him.

"Irvine, a minute," she said. "It seems I completely forgot to administer the teamwork questionnaire to you."

Irvine blinked at her. He had no idea what that was.

"It's a simple questionnaire designed to maximize team communication and efficiency," Doctor K. said. "We usually give it to people four months after their SeeD test, and then at intervals after that, but you skipped the test, so I never put you down for it. Silly me. Lie down and we'll get it over with soon enough."

Irvine felt like protesting for Zell's sake – something was clearly wrong with Zell and he might need medical attention right away – but Dr. K shushed him and made him lie down again. Then she took out a clipboard and paper and a pen, and started to ask him about Squall, and how was working with Squall (fine), and Rinoa and how was working with Rinoa (Rinoa wasn't technically Garden personnel so that was a weird question, but fine), and Quistis and how was working with Quistis (fine), and did he think Quistis put too much pressure on herself—

Bizarre. Why did that matter?

"I guess?" Irvine said. "She seems sad a lot."

"Why do you think that, Irvine?"

He really had no idea? It was just a general sense that he got from her. He remembered her as bossy and triumphant in her orphanage days. Now she was mostly regulation-calm, but in such a way that you started thinking maybe she had some issues boiling up underneath the surface. But he wasn't going to say that to Kadowaki. Oh God, was this a snitch test? Was he being asked to snitch on her? This was standard G-Garden procedure, of course, but the way the Balamb kids went on, you'd think Cid's people didn't do this kind of thing.

"None of this counts for purposes of evaluating the other SeeDs, Irvine," said Dr. K, like she could read his mind. "It's just for working out how you're communicating with them on the team. Let's make it a little more general, just to keep you comfortable. How can you tell when someone is sad? What gives you that information?"

"I guess…she just looks the way I feel when I'm sad," Irvine said, which was as vague as he could be while still being truthful.

"Hmm," said Dr. K. "Tell me more about that."

Weirdly, over the next thirty minutes he found himself telling her a lot. Not about Quistis, though. He didn't want to sell her out in case this was a snitch test, and he didn't want to do that to Zell and Selphie and Squall, either. So every time Dr. K got close to them, he hedged until she asked a more general question or prompted him with some of these strange ink-splattered cards she had (free association could tell her a lot, she informed him calmly), and then he just sort of talked about himself. About Galbadia. About Selphie. About Bexley.

"He hit me once," Irvine said, feeling a little miserable to bring it up, but also weirdly relieved. How could you be miserable and relieved at the same time? Didn't matter. He was. That was how he felt.

"Just once?"

"I only remember the once. Guess if it was more than once, I gave the other memories away, but kept the once so I wouldn't forget what he can do."

That seemed like the sort of gambit he might have pulled with a GF. Another one of these little bargains. Weird trades. Giving away the moments he'd hated, the parts of himself he didn't like, the parts of his history he couldn't face. How messed up was that?

And Selphie. He'd given up Selphie. Why? Had they had a fight? Would he give her up if they did? How could he even trust himself with her? Selphie would never give him away, but him? He gave people away all the time.

"Tell me about that, Irvine."

So then he did. His misery and relief deepened as he did it. Misery because he felt like he was really seeing himself clearly for the first time in a long time, seeing how spotty his memory was and how, for him, all those spots were deliberately picked out. Selected. How cowardly was he, that he couldn't face up to his own memories? But then he also felt relief to share that fact with someone else. It was a dirty secret, but he didn't have to carry it alone. His friends looked to him to be the memory-keeper. Faithful Irvine, guardian of the orphanage days. Up until now, only he had known just how faithless he really was.

"They're not," he told Kadowaki. "Not faithless. They're better than that. Like Selphie, Selphie cares about her friends first, and she'd never do what I did. She keeps diaries of us. Every minute. Even the bad stuff she just makes jokes about, turns into good things, so she can remember it all and be happy about it. She's like that."

"You're dating Selphie, correct?"

"It doesn't interfere with her performance as a Seed," Irvine said quickly.

Dr. K said, "Don't worry about Selphie. Selphie has quite a good reputation. How does that make you feel?"

Selphie did have a good reputation. Or at least he hoped she did. He hoped she hadn't been dragged through the news like he had for the whole Deling City fiasco.

"Good," Irvine said. "She deserves a good reputation. She isn't _me_–"

"Unpack that for me," said Dr. K.

He did. He talked about how he was simultaneously a fashionable rake and a complete moral degenerate by Deling standards; about how lonely it got with not even your own memories to keep you company; about how you couldn't talk about feeling sad, not really, not without being a real pissant of a man, so for that you had to go have sex to talk to somebody; about Rill and how he couldn't remember her, but didn't remember bad things, but that didn't mean he wanted himself all over the papers; about being a sadsack but people never noticed the way they did with Quistis and Squall, because he could cover it up better, only maybe he covered it up too well, and now people thought he never felt anything at all—

"But it's not a big deal," he said, half desperately. "It's not a big deal. I can handle myself."

"Good," Dr. K. said soothingly. "Now, tell me, Irvine. Last question. Do you think anything we've talked about will interfere with the performance of your duties as a SeeD? Anything. Be honest."

"No," Irvine said automatically. Xu was already probably lining up reasons to fire him. No need to give her any more. But then he thought about it for a half-second, thought about how he'd traded away memories of the mission and who knew? Maybe they were crucial memories. Maybe they were what the team would need to figure out Caraway's endgame. And he'd just handed that information off to Siren, who might not even be able to hand it back to him, and then what? Wasn't that the definition of interfering with his work, right there?

He was a piss-poor SeeD and a piss-poor boyfriend in one, probably. He opened his mouth to confess this.

There was a ruckus just beyond the curtain. Rinoa and Xu, calling for Dr. K. Something about Squall. Irvine shot up. Dr. K tucked her clipboard in a drawer and was out in a flash. Irvine followed. In the main room of the infirmary were Rinoa, Selphie (who looked pleased to see Irvine, which left him feeling both relieved and guilty), Xu, Quistis, Zell, a medical intern at Dr. K's desk, and, weirdly, Nida. They were all clustered around the infirmary bed in the other room. Squall was on it. He wasn't moving, but he had his eyes open. He looked. Well. Terrified.

That was a really unnatural look on Squall. Irvine didn't like it.

"What happened?" Irvine demanded.

"He needs medical help," Xu snapped. "Dr. K, get to him. Quistis, in with her. Where's Vandarajan?" The intern's head shot up at her command. "Good. You've got Dincht. Dincht, get in the next room with him. He'll look you over. You three, stay here until I call for you. Someone give Kinneas the couch. He looks like he's gonna die. Nida, let's go. We have to track down Cid. I'll be back in as soon as I can, and then—" Here she leveled them all with an ominous glare. "We debrief fully."

Then she and Nida were gone.

Irvine insisted that he didn't need the couch. He hadn't slept in more than twenty-four hours and felt rubbed raw, now emotionally as well as physically exhausted. But it seemed un-chivalrous to make Rinoa and Selphie stand, especially since he'd been the idiot who'd been captured. And since he felt like he owed Selphie an apology, though he didn't know what for.

Luckily, neither Rinoa nor Selphie bought into his bluster. Although they were each significantly smaller than he was, they manhandled him onto the couch with ease. Then Selphie sat down next to him and put her arms around his head and kissed him and hit his chest a few times and said, her voice heavy with relief, "I'm so glad you're alright!"

Not a fight then. Something else.

"It was a set-up, those creeps!" Selphie said. "No offense, Rinoa, but your dad's a creep."

Rinoa didn't seem to take offense. Rinoa didn't seem to do much of anything. She was staring worriedly at the door of the room where Squall was, fingering a new silver choker she'd somehow acquired, but her gaze was tight with more than worry. Either way, there was no time to think on it. Selphie was spilling everything she'd theorized about Caraway and Tulip Ruta. Irvine added what he knew about Hobbs Worth and the conclusions he'd come to, careful not to let slip that he had given away memories of Selphie for reasons unknown.

"They're covering up this GF thing," Irvine said. "For some reason. But why?"

"Maybe it's the most powerful GF ever!" said Selphie. "Opens its mouth and boom! Apocalypse."

Somehow that seemed unlikely, but it wasn't like they had more to go on.

There was a chuckle from Rinoa. Which was weird. This was a weird time to chuckle, with her boyfriend convulsing in the next room. In her defense, it was kind of a mirthless chuckle. Her face was dead serious: plainly unhappy, tight, and a little furious.

"You wish," Rinoa muttered.

"Noooo," Selphie said, confused. "I don't. Why would I want the Galbadians to have possession of a GF like that?"

Rinoa started, stared at her. "I wasn't talking to you," she said, after a minute.

"Then who were you talking to?" Irvine said.

"Doesn't matter," Rinoa said quickly. Her face went blank. She didn't say anything else.

"I think it does matter," Selphie whispered after a minute, bringing her mouth down to Irvine's ear, a tickly, intimate thing that made Irvine's breath seize up. "She's been…weird. Ever since we left her in the library. Not really here. Almost like she's having a conversation with somebody nobody can see, and then her powers are—"

As if to punctuate this, Rinoa had begun to scowl at no one in particular.

"Fine," Rinoa declared to the open air. "Maybe I should tell them so that they can help me present my side of the story to Xu, since you think Xu's so inherently horrible and mean and likely to get angry with me—"

"She is," Irvine put in. "She will."

"Xu's a freakin' blue dragon in human form, are you kidding?" Selphie said. "Did you not see her chew Nida out?"

Rinoa, who always believed the best of people, opened her mouth as if to chastise them for saying these things about their commanding officer (who Irvine was pretty sure she didn't even like much; it was probably the principle of the thing). Then she closed it without saying anything.

"No need to be smug," she snapped. Then she was quiet for a minute, but began to look increasingly furious.

"We… Weren't…?" Irvine offered. "Being smug, I mean."

"I think that was the guy in your head," Selphie told Rinoa. "Which. Maybe you should be seen by Dr. K. Because you're being a little crazy, and now is not the time, because Squall is out of commission, and Galbadia has this GF—"

"Right," Rinoa said. "No. They don't."

Irvine and Selphie stared at her.

"I do," Rinoa said, in a small voice. "I took him. They don't have him anymore. Which is nice for them, because he's a jerk, and he can shut up now, because guess what? I'm going to tell you everything." Then she rolled her eyes and added, to no one they could see, "No, you don't get a say in whether I tell them. We voted. Angelo voted with me. Yes, Angelo gets a vote. Yeah, fine, sure. Only if they help me present it to Xu. Whatever, as my _boyfriend_ would say.

"Oh, would you shut up about not trusting Xu already?"

* * *

So now comes the story of how Rinoa Heartilly, amateur sorceress, found herself junctioned to the worst GF she ever encountered, one who was so impossible to deal with that he effortlessly antagonized her other GFs, and so then she'd had to give those to Selphie, all while trying to keep her cool, arguing with the new GF, learning that her boyfriend was in trouble, and suspecting that her magic was going insane. This story takes place on the day before, October 19th, and begins just as she recklessly left her friends behind in the library. Rinoa would have told it earlier. But she was simply too preoccupied to tell it when the GF was monopolizing all her attention.

Monopolizing people's attention was his entire personality, in a nutshell.

So. Back to October 19th. It occurred to Rinoa, when halfway up the library stairs, that maybe she could have explained the sudden manifestation of her powers a little better. She didn't like explaining her powers.

They were often unfortunate, embarrassing developments, similar to those odd expansions and upheavals her nanny used to call "blossoming into womanhood" and Caraway used to call "for Hyne's sake, woman, surely a training bra can take care of it." But while Rinoa had sauntered into puberty determined not to let it bring her down, it was hard to feel the same way about changes that left the rest of the world convinced you were just waiting for your chance to assassinate a president or two. So upon gaining sorceress powers, for the first time in her life she opted for the Squall Leonhart method. She just kept moot. Better to say nothing than to risk capsizing the legitimacy of the new Timber government, giving a bad name to the SeeDs, and throwing more awful publicity on her friends. Just because they kept company with someone who could sprout wings, levitate heavy books, and sense magic.

That was why she'd gone invisible. She'd sensed magic. The same magic user she'd felt before; she was sure of it. Still in the library.

Her friends, tenacious SeeDs that they were, had been too busy chasing down a lead to hear a proper explanation even if she'd wanted to offer one. So she'd gone invisible. She hadn't thought it through; it had just seemed like a good idea at the time. She'd be able to sneak around the library undetected, tracking down the original source. And they would get to head off the second source, per their orders from Xu. There. Neat and tidy.

This was really a Timber Owls-style plan. That was to say, not the best under the circumstances. Rinoa could see that a few seconds into it. She hadn't been strategizing, as much as reacting to the sudden insistent magical throbbing against her skull, and maybe the equally sudden arrival of Missy Spaiss.

Missy was one of these people who you knew for years and years, but who it always seemed you'd met only yesterday for all the impact she had on you. Nice. Downright weird about the sorceress thing, but in such a kind way that Rinoa couldn't help but feel bad and want to apologize for never once in her life having given Missy more than the most cursory of second thoughts. They'd met at around age three and attended dance lessons and classes together for years, until a death in Missy's family had pulled Missy out of school for months and relegated her to class B on her return. Rinoa had written her a card out of genuine sympathy; she'd lost her mother at around the same time and Missy's pain had seemed very real. Missy had written her a thank you. And then aside from that they hadn't spoken much. Missy had, at least, never grown into one of the cattier, more passive aggressive girls at Gryphon Prep.

Now, Tulip Ruta, on the other hand.

It wasn't that surprising to discover that she might be silly enough to _want_ to be a sorceress. Rinoa wished Irvine and Selphie luck with her, and also wished that maybe someone would knock some sense into the girl before she hurt herself. Though, to be fair, people often thought things like that about Rinoa. So. Maybe she needed to focus on the mission at hand and put Tulip Ruta out of her head. She had to admit that focusing on the Tulip side of things was making her a smidge hypocritical.

So instead she focused on the casting. Someone was casting. Find the caster. A simple SeeD mission for the world's most obvious not-SeeD.

Rinoa didn't want to be a SeeD, not really. People kept accusing her of playing at SeeD like a little girl because she never bothered to sign up and become a cadet, but how could she? In the first place: she was a sorceress. That meant she might someday become a part of SeeD's hazy objectives, might become someone they had to take down. She was a walking conflict of interest. Because who knew what the future held? Aside from Ultimecia and Time Compression.

Anyway, she didn't want to be a SeeD. Not really. She liked most of the SeeDs she'd met, so it was nothing personal. But SeeD ran like, well, a military machine. And Rinoa had opted out of that kind of thing when she'd run away from home and pledged herself to Timber's democracy. She could have continued at Gryphon, dedicated herself to Deling's aims, and taken a position as her father's aide de camp on graduation. She'd be twice as military as most SeeDs then, with four times the power over other people, given how the Galbadian military was run.

But the Galbadian military wasn't a good system. Not a moral one.

Now Garden - Garden hobbled by morally. They were in the clear, unlike Galbadia, but only because they helped more people than they hurt. Late at night, with Squall's breath deep and even and calming at her shoulder, Rinoa often reminded herself of this. SeeD put more good than evil into the world. Definitely. Probably. Sure, they fought for money. Killed people for money. Toppled governments for money. And they did mostly as they were told by their clients, no free choice or honest democracy involved. But then she'd been a client of theirs, so how hypocritical was it to judge them? And how silly and idealistic and judgmental was she, to care if they were good people on top of all this? Of course they were. Squall and Zell and Selphie and Irvine and Quistis were all good people. Probably even Xu was.

But whole Garden enterprise, in and of itself, was not inherently good. It was, in fact, somewhat crooked. Cid Kramer had ended up bilking money from a prominent Shumi and getting him trapped in an endlessly regenerating cocoon, and even if that Shumi hadn't been very nice, that didn't erase the facts. And out in the reaches of Galbadia, under Martine, the organization had made bids that ended up strengthening the Galbadian army. And, day after day, Garden handed memory-sucking GFs to children, which wasn't the worst thing in the world, except that according to Squall _informing_ the children that they could lose their very identities was a recent policy. Eight months old, in fact. Instituted by the Commander. Due to an offhand comment made by his girlfriend about basic ethics, which had never occurred to him before as being at all relevant to how they conducted Garden business. Being, as he was, Garden-raised, and therefore not terribly concerned with ethics.

Now, maybe she was just the Commander's silly girlfriend, the way Julia Heartilly had just been the General's silly wife. But Julia wouldn't have gotten very far when it came to freeing Timberi political prisoners if she'd joined the army to do it, instead of marrying Caraway in order to reform the system. Though Rinoa hadn't sold herself to Squall to reform SeeD – she loved Squall, and ending up with Squall had just sort of happened – but if that was a neat side benefit, then she was going to take advantage of it. But if she became a cadet? Then that perk would evaporate. Because cadets didn't have much say in anything at Garden: less, in fact, than Squall's silly sorceress girlfriend did.

All this was to say that she didn't have to be a SeeD to be useful to them, or at least to the ones she loved. She could be an intrepid sorceress, and that would have to be enough. And who else but an intrepid sorceress could have detected the casting?

She followed her intrepid sorceress instincts. The stairs opened up onto landings that circled and looked out on the entry hall below; on the first landing, nothing pinged her. The GF and its current master were higher up. She moved on to the top floor. She passed the girl's lavatory with its delicate glass statues and marble fountain just outside; nothing there. Nothing in the stacks. Nothing in the individual study rooms. But there—the star ceiling reading room! There.

She was lucky she was invisible. The room had nothing to hide behind. No tall shelves. Only short ones, coming up to mid height, easy to see over; and many ornate round tables; and low, cozy seats patterned in the city colors; and huge floor-to-ceiling windows along one end that offered up a vista of the commercial district, twinkling underneath a pall of ever-present smog to the south.

Missy had said that no one was here. Missy was either misinformed, or a liar. Everyone was here. All of them, minus Missy and minus Tulip, who was apparently off in some nightclub. Alkonet, Baymoss, Hyssop, Capsicalle, Selinum, Ruta (that is, Tulip's brother, Pindar, leaning over a red book on the far table), Betel, and Calaminth. Eight perfect Deling City heirs. Along with Tulip and Missy, the only children Fury Caraway had ever let within a foot of his daughter if he could help it. And was so odd to see them again, as odd as it had been just a few days ago; they were, after all, very changed and yet still so much the same.

Fashions in Deling City were completely different now. No one did highlights or was wearing dusters anymore. Baymoss – that is, Selene, who'd been Leenie and Rinoa's best friend until Leenie had grown old enough to realize that Rinoa was a weirdo – had kept her golden hair long and flowing for all the time Rinoa had known her. She'd been impossibly vain about it. But now it was cropped short and capped by a jeweled headband with intricate detailing, almost sorceress-like in appearance. Devotion Hyssop had grown three inches, putting him above Rinoa, but still making him the shortest boy in the room without the extremely trendy platform boots he was using to stomp across to the men's room. Glory Calaminth, 'Glo' to every girl in the class but Rinoa, who'd never been granted the honor, was now wearing all black – she'd been doing the same last week – as though she were going through a particularly morbid phase, or impersonating an impoverished Dolletian monk or something. Capsicalle and Selinum, necking in the corner, seemed to be wearing variations on the same designer kilt. August Alkonet had shaved off his red curls and now went in for tatty smoking jackets. Bea Betel had pierced her lower lip; as her lips were very thin, the effect was to make it look as though the lower half of her face would soon be melting off.

Everyone a little bit changed.

But of course it was all the same old vaguely bored faces, breaking into mild humor or slight irritation occasionally, but generally sort of fixed in tedium, except when their eyes might take on an impish glow because they'd spotted something they found exciting. Generally drugs. Sometimes an attractive person. Sometimes someone to make fun of. Often all three.

What did these people, silly people who had everything handed to them, want with GFs, with magic? And which one of them had the GF?

Before she could even finish thinking the question, Pindar Ruta straightened up. He was perhaps the most interesting of the group, the one Rinoa had always gotten along with best, leagues nicer than his sister, and incredibly intelligent, erudite, and handsome, always kind to Rinoa. Though still a snob through and through. He was really the first person who'd taught Rinoa that you could have good and bad in you, since his kind nature was at odds with his staunchly pro-Deling politics.

He snapped his fingers. And then watched, with interest, as fire bloomed up. Ruta's sister wasn't involved with the GF. Ruta himself was.

"Neat," was all he said.

"Neat," Alkonet mimicked, making a face at the word.

"Well, it is," said Ruta easily. "I hope you haven't flooded Missy with too many lies."

"Just enough to send Heartilly scarpering back to Daddy," said Selene. Then, to Hyssop, who had trooped back in from the men's room, "After we spotted them chatting down below the landing, we thought it might be best to use her to draw Heartilly off. I swear Heartilly almost sensed something last week."

Poor Missy. They were manipulating her.

"Rinoa can't sense things," Ruta murmured. "She's not a guard hound. She's a nice girl. With some…additions, these days."

"She's Adel two," said Selene. "You won't be laughing when Timber and the Commander conquer us."

Ruta aimed a finger at her and her designer handbag began to smoke. Selene shrieked, trying to put it out.

"Not cool!" she said. "Stop using it! You're supposed to deliver it to the General!"

Oh. Oh, fuck. Rinoa never, ever swore, but. _Fuck_. Caraway was in on it. Just when she thought Caraway was maybe improving, that maybe the good in him (and it was there, faint and small and pathetic, the one small flicker that had made life with him bearable for Julia) was winning out… He did something like this. Acquired a GF. In pure violation of his agreement with Garden.

_Well, come on, Rinoa,_ she told herself. _You didn't expect him to honor that agreement, did you?_

"He hasn't asked for it," said Ruta.

"Only because he's biding his time, and if you're caught with it in the meantime it's curtains for you," said Glo Calaminth, rolling her eyes. "You should have just left them to their own devices. Why get in the middle?"

"I was selected," Ruta said sharply, "And it's an honor. The rest of you should try thinking about something more than yourselves, for once." Then he snapped the book closed and stood, holding it close to him. It was a simple red-bound volume, apparently one in a series, to go by the jacket, which, when Rinoa crept closer, declared it an Unpublished Proof by some unknown. The thing seemed to glow with power. Was a book the GF's Manifest? That seemed… unwieldy. There were some GFs that were focused in buttons, and some with strange metallic totems, and some that were simply drawn from small rocks. But pebbles or metals you could fashion into jewelry, and the SeeDs often did this. And a button you could sew onto your clothes with relative ease; Zell had shown her how to do this, way back when they'd first met, with Quetzacoatl's Manifest. At the time, she might have preferred a book. A book you could read; a book was useful. It seemed strange that the SeeDs concentrated so much of their power in little trinkets instead of something useful.

But then how cumbersome would it be to carry a book into battle?

Ruta tucked the book under his arm and strode out of the room, leaving his classmates to roll their eyes at him. Rinoa followed …the men's lavatory.

Her harebrained adventures usually led Rinoa to interesting places. Like, to being ensorcelled by her boyfriend's old Matron, herself ensorcelled at the time. To being junctioned by the evil sorceress Adel. To floating around in the distant horizons of hanging off the side of the garden for fifteen minutes, while Zell ran around panicking, looking for a rope. That kind of thing. But never to, well, a bathroom. That was new. And slightly uncomfortable.

The men's lav at Gryphon was a mirror of the women's, only with elaborately painted urinals (of all things) in place of an elaborately carved powder station. Rinoa focused on the fancy dragon taps and the soft hand towels, and watched Ruta in the mirror, torn between being faithful to the mission, and giving in to her discomfort. She didn't want to watch Ruta pee. This seemed to her the ultimate joke – SeeDs on SeeD missions of course got to do thrilling, if morally questionable, SeeD things. They got to shoot, attempt to prevent missile attacks, escape prison, discover ancient sources of mystical power, plumb the depths of the Deep Sea Research laboratory. Silly non-SeeDs, when left to their own devices, got to follow boys into bathrooms. This wasn't morally concerning, but it did speak volumes about the dubious rewards of living a too-upright life. No wonder so many people went in for being jerks-for-pay instead. Jerkitude was exciting. Natural jerks got to have all the fun. While people who tried to do the right thing all the time had to get their kicks in where they could, because soon enough it would be time to discover that all the parental figures in your life were shady in the extreme and would inevitably disappoint you, and also to follow handsome boys into awkward situations that quickly dulled the glamour of knowing them in the first place.

Ruta went into the stall. Rinoa decided to wait outside. Yes, she was invisible and could have poked her head over the stall walls without him knowing. But. Ew. So much about this situation was disgusting, and not even excitingly disgusting like facing down blobras or chomping on massive moon beasts or suffering from poison status effects and leaking green goo out of your ears. Because all that had been horrible, but Rinoa had done it without complaint and not even minded. She'd been on a mission to save the world from an evil future sorceress and her sort-of-ex. That made all the gross moments kind of extraordinary. She could look on them with placid acceptance.

Whereas this was just embarrassing.

Well. No. No, she told herself. It wasn't. She was doing this for SeeD, or at least to keep Caraway from striking out against her friends. She wasn't particularly committed to SeeD; the issue of which GFs went where was one that had little meaning for her, as long as everyone involved understood the risks and as long as the power of the GFs wasn't used for evil. But that was just it. Caraway could hardly use power for good. She knew him. He was the kind of man who could justify the use of excess force to dampen a rebellion he himself had helped ignite. He'd done it a million times. And GFs were high-profile excessive force now. Ever since Garden had come clean about their group's involvement and heroism during the Ultimecia War (Rinoa might have had a hand in that; she wouldn't lie to the public, not even if secrecy would have made their lives easier), military groups across the world had become very interested in Garden's methods. GFs, forgotten in the wake of the Adel war, considered a passing fad of previous decades, became again premier and cutting edge military technology, became something nearly everyone wanted. Caraway could hardly be an exception, and now he'd tasked Pindar Ruta, of all people, with holding onto a new GF, a new source of power, for him.

Which wasn't a crazy scheme. It was actually fairly clever. Ruta was one of Deling City's untouchable beings. No one would dare apprehend or arrest him, not without making a lot of noise and upsetting a lot of powerful people, so much noise and so many powerful people that was probably not worth the trouble. Gryphon kids like Ruta weren't accountable to anyone, not to the populace, even. They weren't like their parents, power-brokers with a duty to the government. They were hardly adults yet – a weird thought, given that they were the same age as Rinoa's friends, and Rinoa's friends couldn't help but be adults at this point – just coddled, wealthy, lucky, spoilt creatures, children who had yet to decide their paths in life, who would take the reins to the city in time, but not right now. Right now they were simply kids from good families. Wild, but always given leeway. Always accepted. Respected for the sheer breadth of the opportunities they had. Their foibles written off or quietly tucked away. Their lives shrouded from public view.

Well. Clearly Ruta had seen a path forward to adulthood: Caraway. And that path would be a tangled and ugly one, Rinoa was sure, but then it also seemed fitting. Ruta had always liked the romance of a United Galbadia, and that was Caraway's chief banner. And Caraway had always liked Ruta, who he found more sensible than Rinoa's other not-friends.

"So many of those kids you hang out with haven't got the brains Hyne gave a geezard," he would say, irritated, on those nights he managed to be home in time for supper (rare, but never treasured).

"Yes, well, you won't let me hang out with anyone else," Rinoa would say sweetly.

Hyne. She almost missed sparring with the old anacondaur. She felt a spike of pain at the thought. She loved him, in her own way. But more and more she was beginning to realize that the best way to love him would be in the same way he expressed his love for her. By penning him in on every side, limiting his influence. She'd always been grateful that Deling City naming customs tied her to her mother instead of to Caraway, but the truth was, she was half Caraway. She had a streak of old Fury in her too. And it came out when it came time to deal with people she didn't like very much. She had a tendency fight them in large ways and small, cut them short with a smile, pick and pick and pick at them softly, clandestinely, teasingly, but firmly. Until they either changed their ways or admitted defeat. This was the old spy method, the Fury Caraway method. And, for most of her life, Rinoa had been turning that exact method on Fury Caraway. Because she loved him. But she didn't like him.

Behind the stall door, she heard the rustling of pages.

Ruta was reading. On Deling's own bowl. Oh, Hyne. Obnoxiously banal had a new name, and it was 'Rinoa Heartilly's daily life.' Well. She had to get that book, so maybe she should just shut up and put up and do it. It was better than waiting for Ruta to get bored with his bathroom reading. She didn't remember him as especially studious, but he was smart, and waiting around for him to finish could take hours. And hopefully the book would cover any of his bits, right? And it wasn't like she would be peeping for peeping's sake. She was just trying to get the lay of the land, to figure out how to take the GF with her. The magic it gave off was all-consuming, brilliant, bright. If she could junction the thing, she knew, from experience, it would just meld with her own magic and it would stop bothering her. But as long as someone else had it and was casting, it would needle at her constantly, and this was by far the worst GF she'd encountered in this respect. It was giving her a headache just to be near it.

She crossed into the stall next to Ruta's, trying to make as little noise as possible. She quietly pulled down the seat, then stood on it and gingerly peeked over the edge of the partition between his stall and hers, holding her breath. Unnecessary. He wasn't even doing anything. He was completely clothed, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, seated on the top seat with his back against the porcelain tank, his long legs crooked, his feet planted on the stall door. He was lazily rifling through the unpublished proof. He held tightly to one side of it and with his other hand very unconcernedly sparked up a small fire to light his cigarette, which seemed silly until Rinoa realized he'd chosen the stall just below the biggest vent, evidently looking for a quiet place and a smoke.

It wasn't like she could blame him, with the company he'd been keeping. But she still needed that book. How to get it?

Levitation was useless. It would draw far too much attention. So would flying over the stall and just plucking the book out of his hands. She supposed she could speak pre-Ancient Centran at him, but that would have little effect and might just make him think the bathroom was haunted. Would he drop the book and scurry away in fright? Probably not. That was for children's detective stories, not real life. Maybe she could mute him? Without his voice, he wouldn't be able to cast as effectively. He was bound to realize that something was wrong then, though, and maybe he would blame it on the GF and conveniently drop it somewhere in order to investigate, but that seemed a long shot. Probably he would instead realize something was up and bring half the library staff down on her head.

So her sorceress powers were completely useless here. As usual.

What would a SeeD do? Engage him in battle, probably. Only she didn't really want to hurt Ruta, and he was more useful alive as a definitive link to Caraway. And anyway, she didn't know what his GF could do. There was no guarantee it wasn't like Eden and really really powerful; in fact, the strength of his casting suggested that it was a doozy of a GF. So there was no guarantee she'd win the fight, anyway, especially on her own. No. She'd have to think outside the box for this to work.

Ruta took a drag of his cigarette. Then, balancing the book on his knees, he quickly snapped it shut, keeping his hand firmly pressed on the front cover. When he lifted the cover again, Rinoa could see why. He'd been hiding something between the cover and the frontispiece. Silver. A chain. A necklace of some sort. He drew it out and crouched over it, letting the book fall to the floor.

The book wasn't the Manifest. This was.

Only Ruta's head was blocking her view of it. He was talking to it.

"Don't think, for a second, that I trust you," he told it furiously. "What you've done to this city is a disgrace. You'll be serving Deling City from this day forward. It'll give some meaning to your life. Consider yourself lucky."

Ah. She'd totally forgotten how he had this mix of pompous and melodramatic to him. He was a nice person, but the speeches he could produce, simply when offering a rebuttal to her in class, often came off like a combination of Seifer at his craziest and Squall at his most uncharacteristically devoted. In fact, she could probably credit Ruta with immunizing her against boys who had slightly bizarre characters and a lot of hidden passion. He'd had so many quiet yet intense arguments with her that she had come to find that sort of thing a little charming instead of just obnoxious. Good times.

"So not presume to tell me my own orders," Ruta continued stiffly. "In order to keep you safe – which I'm doing for Deling City, _not_ for you - I plan to keep you with me at all times. SeeD seems to be poking about—" he broke off, as though the GF was saying something to him, which it probably was. "Well. That gives us a common aim, then," he said, "Assuming you're being truthful."

Then he sat and held the Manifest in his hand for a moment. Rinoa soundlessly dropped down to the floor, where she peeked under the partition this time, trying to get a view that wasn't blocked by Ruta's head. First she saw the book - _The Nature of the Sorceress_; well, there was something that would have come in handy last week, if only Ruta hadn't apparently been monopolizing it – and then the tangle of Ruta's long legs, and then…

No.

The Manifest looked very familiar. Too familiar. Rinoa freaked out for a second and shoved her head back into her stall, bumping it on the paper dispenser and muffling a shriek of pain.

Ruta straightened up. "Is someone there?" he asked.

Well. Yes. But it was a public restroom, though not exactly open to Rinoa, so whatever. She was about to duck her head under again to get a second look, cursing her stupidity, when Ruta straightened up and picked up the book. Then she heard the jingle of metal, and he was opening the door of the stall and striding out. She felt him spark up another fire spell – what, had he only ever encountered one draw point in his entire life? – and peered anxiously around the door of her stall to see him.

He was wearing it. The Manifest. The really familiar one, which belonged on an entirely different melodramatic mess of a young man, and which she had – she now realized – sort of assumed she'd never see again. She'd never had any idea it was a Manifest. Or that it had been snatched from its original owner. Or even if she would have wanted to see it again, had it found its way to her around the right throat, in the hands of the _right_ person.

She did know that it made her a little angry to find Ruta wearing it, all of a sudden. It wasn't his. And it wasn't her father's, either. At the very least, it should have gone to SeeD, or to its owner's friends or something. If something had happened to him – and something had to have happened, if he'd had a GF wrenched from his grasp after having kept its existence a secret all throughout the war, which he must have done, if that choker was a Manifest – then… Well. The something that had happened to him ought to have come at the hands of the people who had once meant something to him. That was a very short list, Rinoa knew. Maybe her and maybe Cid and maybe, like, two other people. But the list definitely didn't include Pindar Ruta. Nor Fury Caraway.

She didn't quite know what she was doing, or why; she simply knew that she was very, very angry all of a sudden. And when she'd been a normal girl, strong emotions like anger had usually led her to do harebrained things. Now that she was a sorceress, she didn't need to do harebrained things. Her anger made her very will a reality.

Ruta's book flew out of his grasp. He dropped into a crouch. "Who's there?" he called again, summoning up flame with both hands and looking about wildly.

No point to _that_. The book was way ahead of him. It flew at his face – Rinoa sent it there – and then, purely because she was pissed off, it smacked him once on each cheek. He stumbled back. She floated the book up and, with alarming speed, dropped it on his head. It was a nice, thick proof, so she only had to do this six or seven more times to knock him out.

His flame sputtered out. Rinoa strode forward and grabbed the book, then yanked the choker off his neck.

"I've got you," she told the GF inside. "I've got you. It's okay. I know this is a long shot, but do you remember what… What's happened to your master?"

She curled her will around it. That was all it took to junction: proximity and will, and the will part had started to come ridiculously easily to her after she'd absorbed Edea's powers. So she felt the GF settle in her head next to the others. It was extremely powerful. Not as faded a presence as Alexander or Leviathan. Almost human in how bright and alive it felt.

But it didn't answer her at first.

"What's your name?" Rinoa said, wanting answers. "Were you junctioned to Seifer Almasy? You were, weren't you?"

_Listen_, said a very, very familiar voice. _Get out of here first. Find some out of the way spot. _Not _your dad's house, Rinoa. And then… Then we've gotta talk._

Rinoa dropped the book on Ruta's head (again) in shock.


	15. Chapter 15

Rinoa took him to the cafe. She sat there with her shades on, dumbfounded. Her headscarf slid down to her neck. She didn't notice. Her cup of coffee kept magically refilling itself. She didn't notice that either. She'd removed her older Manifests because those GFs had become very agitated at such a new, disruptive presence. She was now tapping the Manifests against the table in agitation herself. She had no idea she was doing this.

"Where have you been?" she asked the air, in a language no one around her could understand or even seemed to hear. "What-It's been months. And now you show up? You, after all you did, you-"

She said something very hurtful, and was stunned to discover that she meant it, and just as stunned to discover that it hurt her to mean it. She didn't want to be mean. She wished she hadn't said it, even though it had felt good to say it.

_So get rid of it_, was the swift reply.

She did. She erased it from time. It was gone. She'd never said it.

The hollow anger inside her was still there, though.

He was there too, now. And he could feel what she did; she'd junctioned him; they were connected. She didn't want to be connected to him, but she didn't quite want to be free of him, either. She couldn't sort it out. The anger grew.

_I'm s-_ he began.

"I don't kare if you're sorry!" she spat out, and immediately pushed herself back from the cafe table in horror, because she heard it. The _k_. She sounded like-like-

"I'm turning into her," she told her cup of coffee. The cup toppled, righted itself, refilled, toppled, righted itself, refilled. It seemed to be trapped in some kind of forever state. A small spot of Time Compression. Was she doing that?

Rinoa's anger vanished and became horror instead.

_You are_ not_ turning into her_, was the firm reply.

He used to talk like that all the time: direct, confident, like he had all the answers. Like he could take on the world. She remembered him very well: a certain version of him seemed to exist forever in the summer sunshine. Tall, skin going pink with heat and gold with light, the brightness all around him highlighting his jaw, his straight nose, his oddly dark lashes. He'd seemed very old and knowing compared to her - she'd been sixteen, and even if she was only a little older than that now, now she _felt _so much older that she knew: at sixteen practically anybody could seem old and smart if they were self-assured enough. So over time her memory had warped him, a bit. Where once he'd seemed so much wiser and stronger, now, she realized, she'd reformulated that summertime Seifer Almasy. She'd experienced him as strong, incisive: the older boy. But now she saw that the Seifer she'd met back then hadn't been strong. He'd only been trying to come off that way. And he hadn't been incisive, only youthfully opinionated. And he hadn't been so much older than her.

Which didn't excuse the Seifer that had come after. Because she had two Seifers in her memory. The first was shining, knowing, golden, reaching out to clasp her hand on the bridge above the incoming train, pulling her out of harm's way just in time, saving her and holding her close, so that she buried her head in his chest in fright and he laughed comfortingly above her. Jumping away from death itself, together. The game had seemed very adult to her, and it must have felt adult to him too, or, she suspected, he would never have played it. But it wasn't an adult game. It was an old Timber game; a game of railroad chicken. It was the flirting game Timberi little boys and girls had played for years. And she'd always wanted to be a real Timberi girl, not Caraway's daughter at all. And he'd always wanted to be something like her savior, or somebody's savior anyway. So, for one summer, the game had been perfect for them.

_...you remember that?_ he said, his voice very soft in her mind.

"I remember other things, too," she snapped at him, and the cafe table split itself in half. No one noticed but her, and when she noticed it she felt again a wave of horror and revulsion. But she couldn't say for whom. She wanted to say that it wasn't horror at herself; she wanted to say that it was horror at Seifer. The second Seifer, the other Seifer that she could remember. He was everything the first Seifer had been, but transmuted, gone wrong. Not confident, just arrogant. Not shining, but panting, a line of sweat dripping from his brow to his jaw to the top of his ragged coat. Not so knowing; only willing to use his knowledge and his ability to taunt and hurt others.

And not saving her from the incoming train. Just throwing her right onto it, to suit his own purposes.

This new Seifer, this third incarnation - whether he was friend or foe, she didn't know, and that bothered her, and that was maybe why her powers were spiraling so rapidly out of control - said nothing for a moment. Then his voice came again, not comforting, not strong, not even taunting. Simply toneless:

_You said you didn't want me to apologize._

"How _kould_ I want you to?" she spat at him, wishing she could stop, bottle up her anger, let go of this powerful inhumanity that was surging through her, making her not herself, making her - something like Ultimecia.

But she couldn't.

"You apologize - then what? You kan forget, and move on! Seifer Almasy gets to move on! But what if _I_ kan't?"

Seifer didn't have to live with the results of his actions. She did. She woke up every single day and checked her eyes in the mirror to make sure they weren't red, or even gold. Went to meetings with the Timber delegation and smiled and reminded herself that she didn't want to conquer anyone, that she didn't want to rule, that she wouldn't become the next great threat to the world. Hunted down books and power sources, and for what? Not to use them. Never to use them, never to grow her powers. Simply to control her powers. To control herself. And now, as she looked over the ruin of the table, she could see her biggest fears confirmed. There was no point. There was only one path a sorceress could take: ruin. For herself, for others, for everything around her. And she - who'd only ever wanted to do good with her life - was too far gone down the path of the sorceress to turn away now.

_It's true_, Rinoa thought despairingly._ It's true, and I'm really going to become her._

And Seifer's voice came again.

_Bullshit_.

"What do you know?" Rinoa said, half-shouting and not even realizing it. Behind her, the mirrors on the walls began to show cracks, first slowly, then with increasing speed. The cafe servers failed to realize they were being showered with glass. People laughed over mugs of chocolate and plates of pastry as the ceiling shook and plaster rained down.

_Well_, said Seifer Almasy, _I know you. And I know her. I'm probably the one person in the past, present, or future who knows you both._

The plaster and glass stopped mid-fall.

Rinoa hoped against hope that he would say the right thing now, the thing that could spur her on and give her courage. The first Seifer Almasy had always been able to. The second - not so much. And of course she couldn't trust him; she couldn't trust that he would be his first self, and not the second.

"And?" Rinoa prompted, after a moment.

She felt, more than heard, a small exhalation. It was like this new Seifer, the Seifer trapped like a GF inside his own choker, had sighed. But that was unlikely, because Seifer wasn't a quiet sighs kind of person, not in any incarnation. He'd never seemed to pause even for a second for something as mundane as a sigh. He was fast, sharp, and direct in all forms.

_I'm the one person in all of time who knows both you and Ultimecia, Rinoa_, he said again, then. _So if anybody can tell you this, it's me._

_Trust me: you are no Ultimecia._

And, just like that, the cafe righted itself. The glass rushed up out of the mugs, the plaster rearranged itself on its ceiling, the mirrors and table re-formed. But Rinoa's coffee cup horribly continued its Time Compressed dance.

Disappointed, scared, and disgusted with herself, Rinoa said, "The kup-"

_You're not doing that,_ Seifer said.

"Who else is, then?" Rinoa demanded.

_Me._

What?

Another internal sigh, it sounded like. A sense of incredible exhaustion, like the kind many of the GFs carried with them. A confused, uncertain sense, which was something she'd never before associated with Seifer Almasy, but then he was the only being she was junctioning right now, so it had to come from him.

He said, _Maybe it's you and me. What happens when our powers collide. But you're not turning into her. It's not you. It's me. I was her Knight. I soaked her in, a little. Don't ask me how. I don't know yet. Or I forgot, maybe. But the point is: most of what I can do now, I got from her somehow. The imprint of her on me. It's made me...something else._

Well. Yes. That was evident. One question came unbidden to her, one way of further clarifying the obvious.

"Did she get rid of your body somehow?" Rinoa asked. "Or did-did Time Kompression?"

Hyne, but she wished she'd stop doing that _k_ thing. She couldn't figure out why she was doing it.

_You're not doing it,_ was the somewhat wry reply. _Or. Well. That's-I've got her language in me. Their language. Sorceress tongue, the oldest tongue in the earth. You have it, too, since you're a sorceress, but I think I'm forcing it to the surface somehow._

_And no. She didn't get rid of my body. And I got it back after Time Kompression._

"Got it back?" Rinoa said, confused. "What do you-then what happened to it? You're-you're some kind of GF now; how did this happen to you? Who did this?"

_...I don't know. I don't remember._

"How do you not remember?" Rinoa said. "How do you not remember losing your entire body?" She was perplexed, and upset, and - dammit - worried for him in spite of herself. She took up her old Manifests again and started clanging them on the table, still not really realizing she was doing it.

_I don't know!_ came his annoyed response. _That's what I needed to talk to you about, Rinoa. I- what I did before right now is a blur. What I did for the past month is a blur. It's like my recent life is... It's leaving me._

"So you have no short-term memory?" Rinoa tried.

Another sigh, this time exasperated. _Sure. I guess. I remember up until a few months ago. I know a few things about what led me here._

"Like?" Rinoa prompted.

Silence, for a moment. Then:

_Don't get upset on me now._

Well, that wasn't a good sign. She cursed his stupid sense of drama. Why did he have to drag it out? Why couldn't he just say whatever it was? And it wasn't like he didn't owe it to her not to play little games like this, given that the bigger games he'd played had ruined her life.

"Why would I get _more _upset with you? _How_ could I get more upset with you-"

_Do you know where Squall is?_

"What?" she said, dumbfounded.

_Do you know where Squall is? No. Scratch that. Do you know when Squall is? Is he asleep? Awake? Can you find him? Can you get to him? You need to get to him._

_What I'm trying to say is: I remember Squall._

_But I shouldn't. He shouldn't have been there._

_Rinoa, do you know if he's there now? Do you know if he's still outside his own head?_

* * *

By the next morning, far away, on the other side of the world, Rinoa and Seifer weren't the only people wondering that.

"But I didn't," Ellone told herself. "I didn't! Or-" here her voice dropped to a whisper, "-at least I don't think I did."

Ellone had never had reason to be uncomfortable with her powers. This was extraordinary. Her powers were just about the worst set of powers a girl could have.

When she was three, her powers had convinced Estharian soldiers to gun her parents down in their own kitchen. When she was a little older, her powers had led to her kidnapping. Then that had led Laguna to leave behind (a pregnant; not that anyone had known it at the time) Raine, and then that had led Laguna to Esthar, and then that led - before anyone, least of all Laguna, could have guessed - to almost twenty years of presidential service, a task Laguna had accepted only because his rewards for rescuing Ellone from the results of her powers were a dead lover, an empty house, and an infant he hadn't even known about.

And that was just what Ellone's powers had done for Laguna and son.

For Ellone, they'd meant a good long time on the White SeeD ship, a place she regarded as a kind of mobile prison. The Orphanage, at least, had had some homeyness. Squall had been there, a persistent little shadow, a ghost of Raine at her side. Loud, would-be hero Seifer had patrolled the courtyard as though to call up Laguna patrolling the Winhill square back home. Quisty was slim, confident, and sharp-eyed, like Mr. Kiros was there in spirit, somehow. Sefie and Irvy played in the kitchen, safe, happy; with the Adel war over, there would be no bullets flying at the happy couple this time. And Zell had tumbled around underfoot, the soft, goodhearted baby of the bunch. Like what she'd imagined Raine's baby might be like, back when Raine had been living and no one could have guessed that Raine's child would turn out quiet and wounded from the start. Robbed of its parents.

It hadn't been the home Ellone had always wanted. But she'd been able to scrounge up something of Winhill there anyway. She'd been able to see the connections: how these children might, someday, grow into something like the loving heroes who'd made her earliest childhood worthwhile.

But her powers meant that she was soon banished from this home, too. So she really should have been more uncomfortable with her powers.

She couldn't be. She'd been losing people all her life. Her powers meant one key thing: they were never gone for long. She'd had to leave Squall and the rest behind. But she could always, always dip back into their heads. They existed preserved in the past, and the past - even the very recent past - was an open book to Ellone. She could close her eyes and stroll there at will, take a nap and find herself back on the beach on a bonfire night, dancing behind Selphie's eyes, prowling behind Seifer's, nervously creeping up to the others behind Zell's.

She could go back to Raine, too. It was strange to go back to Raine. When she'd started doing it she'd been very young, and she'd done it because she'd wanted to take on a piece of Raine, to have something to pass onto Squall. She'd assumed that this was why Squall loved her. He didn't know it at the time, but his Sis was reflecting his lost mother. She'd go to bed and wake up five years earlier, and watch Raine bustle around the bar downstairs, pouring out a drink for Laguna as he helped her - the earlier her, the original Ellone, the happy one - learn to read. She'd wake up then and she'd remember what it felt to be Raine, the kinds of happy, loving thoughts Raine had had. And she would try and channel those thoughts herself. For Squall.

But over time she'd stopped being Raine because that had become confusing. Raine had been an adult woman. Ellone, visiting her mind, was just a little girl. The feelings Raine had for Uncle Laguna were ardent, powerful; so too were the feelings Uncle Laguna had for her, when Ellone dropped into his mind. It made her uncomfortable, and she retreated, and decided instead to be only children for a bit, and so she was. Over the years, Ellone became a variety of children whenever she closed her eyes at night. She was very, very good at it. She became a young boy picking up a gunblade for the first time, showing it off with delight even though it was far too big for him, saying, "C'mon, Squall, don't be a crybaby. He'll get you one too, I'll bet, and then we can be Wardegrave and the second Knight!"

She became a beautiful, lonely little girl in Dollet, ignored by her parents, her only friend her own bright mind and need to learn, to explore, to keep busy, to excel.

She became an even lonelier little boy living down near Deling City, wishing his father would ignore him, stuck in a house near the desert all stained by red dust, scared and unhappy.

She became a daring, happy girl in Trabia, a friend to all: to smaller children, to her teachers, to chocobos and even to the icicles on the windowpane in the morning: a sunlight girl all surrounded by snow.

And she became Mrs. Dincht's treasured snow baby, her blond, blue-eyed rowdy boy, imported into to the sunlight town of Balamb, adored all his days, encouraged to grow strong and moral.

In fact, the only one she'd never become was Squall. She'd looked in on him, of course. Seifer's mind was good for that; he and Squall had never been separated, unlike the others. But something about becoming Squall had seemed wrong; it had seemed like she was trying to take more from him than she already had. She felt, secretly, that she'd taken a lot. She and her powers had taken his mother, taken his father, taken his rightful home. She'd been allowed a few years in Winhill, and a small period with Laguna and Raine. But Squall - Squall who was their rightful son - had been cut out of his mother as she'd died, and never known his father, and only ever had the Orphanage.

Only one night, she'd thought, _Well, what if I could fix it for him?_

Every year, her powers grew stronger. As a child, she'd visited ancient temples in her dreams, seen the rise and fall of great empires, all the while never knowing that she was seeing the distant past itself. But as she got older, she'd begun to go less far back. She'd want to see how Squall and Seifer and Cid were doing now, not three years ago. So she wouldn't go back three years. She'd go back three milliseconds.

She didn't just have to visit the past. She could visit the present, too. And so she became very, very confident. Almost cocky. And she realized that the past and the present weren't so different, and that if she wanted to fix the present, then maybe she should try fixing the past. For Squall. But also for all the rest of them. Selphie and Zell were doing fine. But the others were growing unhappier every day.

So there had to be a way. She had to have been given these powers for a reason, after all. Normally, when she went back to someone's past, or slid into someone's present, she was a silent observer. She seemed to exist on some other plane, separated from her subject by distance or time or both. She could see them. But they had no idea she was there, and she'd never tried to communicate with them; how could she? How could you communicate with someone when you were here and they were there, or you were in the future, and they were in the past, when there was a barrier? But what if she could erase the barrier? She could. She knew she could; she just knew it.

She understood her powers instinctively. And she knew that she'd always been really good at eroding certain things, the things that kept people apart. She could put two consciousnesses in one body; she could snatch up someone's inner self and whirl it into her own mind. She called it connecting. But there was another word for it. She was, simply, a natural at junctioning and de-junctioning. People said this process took a piece of hard magic - a Manifest - and proximity, and will.

Ellone had only ever needed the will.

But to change the past she thought she would have to junction to an adult. She had been by this time going on fifteen, routinely visiting her nine-and-ten year old friends, but still a little too scared to venture into an adult. She didn't feel adult, personally. She didn't feel anything. Her days were spent in tedious lessons with Matron, learning history and politics and for what? She wouldn't be allowed to do anything until the cryptic future Matron sometimes alluded to had come to pass; until that future passed her by.

Still, she felt she had a duty to Squall and to the other children. So she selected the adult who'd never, ever shirked his duty for as long as she'd known him. And she didn't go into his past. Instead she did something she'd been longing to do for a long, long time, but had never done because it had seemed to her that it might be painful, to have Laguna so close and yet be unable to bring him closer:

She slid into Laguna's present.

When the fifteen-year old Ellone had closed her eyes, she'd been on the White SeeD ship in the night, floating in the shadowy sea above the Northwestern Galbadia continent. When she opened them, it was day and she was in a beautiful red-carpeted corridor with strange technological sigils set into the high walls. She was standing on a ladder and wearing a white apron of some kind and holding a paintbrush and palette, dripping paint all over the steps beneath the ladder.

"Mr. President," someone said, sounding almost embarrassed.

And Laguna said, "Be honest, Buday. Do you think I should add Moombas? Moombas would really throw Roshan for a loop!"

Laguna was the one standing on the ladder and wearing the apron. He was on the steps in the corridor just beyond his office. The ladder swayed. He swayed with it, and the presidential aide standing below him - Buday, presumably - gave a horrified shriek and dove next to the ladder to break the president's fall. The ladder collapsed. Laguna fell. Buday gave a grunt as a hundred-seventy-odd pounds of president fell on paintbrush and palette fell on him, too. And as he'd fallen - or dived, rather - onto a white sheet laden with buckets of paint in varying colors, he was now a sodden rainbow mess.

For his part, the president was slightly sticky, rather green in the face (owing to the paint), but completely unharmed.

"You didn't have to do that," Laguna said, patting Buday on the shoulder. "I would've been fine! You know me, Buday, I'm tough."

"And yet there's only one of you, Mr. President," was the muffled reply.

Laguna scowled. He stood up and tried to clean the paint off of Buday. Mostly he succeeded in covering Buday in more paint. "So what? There's only one Buday," he said.

"No, Mr. President. I'm the middle child of three identical triplets," Buday forced out, groaning between some of the words.

"Well, anyway, think of your kids!" said Laguna, trying to help him up.

"I had myself sterilized during the rise of Adel, Mr. President," Buday managed. "I worried that my wife and I would create sorceress heirs."

"Think of your wife!"

"I'm afraid she left me, Mr. President."

"...oh," said Laguna. After a moment, he shrugged and hauled Buday up with more strength than he might have been credited with. "All the more reason to resolve to find a new reason to live," he told Buday sagely.

Buday's paint-streaked face broke into a pained smile.

"Thank you, Mr. President," he said. Pleased, Laguna thumped him on the back in good cheer. Buday almost went down again. Laguna cursed himself, then hurriedly handed Buday off to two new aides who'd come running up to help.

"Make sure Buday gets well taken care of!" he called after them, as they lifted Buday away. "There's only one of him! Of three, that is. But he's my favorite one! Though I guess I don't know his brothers; maybe they're nice. Aw, Hyne. It's the principle of the thing. Buday's still unique! All people are unique! Like snowflakes and grains of sand in the desert. Like grains of snowflakes in the desert..."

He trailed off, considering this. Ellone felt his brain buzzing with it. He seemed to feel it was an important philosophical truth and that if he could tease it apart he might find some meaning. He stood there on the steps to his office with green paint on his face, deep in thought, considering.

There was a cough. Laguna ignored it.

The cough morphed into a familiar voice.

"Like grains of snowflakes in the desert," Kiros Seagill said.

"Good, right?" said Laguna, looking up at him. Kiros and Ward had come striding into the corridor some time ago, but he only noticed them just now.

"Like grains of _snowflakes_ in the _desert_," Kiros repeated. Next to him, Ward shook his head a little sadly. They exchanged a look. Ellone thought it was a lot like the looks Seifer and Quistis had once exchanged over the heads of the younger children whenever they caught them saying something particularly slow.

What. A. Moron, the look said.

"Hey, I don't see you comforting Buday!" Laguna said in response. "Poor Buday. He's had a rough day, and you two come up like snapperheads-"

"-snapperheads," said Kiros dispassionately.

"Yeah! I said snapperheads! That's what you are, with your snappity heads, givin' me and Buday a hard time!"

"Buday's hard time is probably because his boss wants to stick a panorama of Winhill all over the Presidential Palace," said Kiros, pointing up at the picture Laguna had been painting. "Maybe. What do you think, Ward?"

Ward raised an eyebrow and nodded, once, powerfully and damningly. Laguna sagged.

"Well, I've gotta have some hobbies of my own..." he muttered. "It can't all be President stuff."

"Do you want it to be President stuff at all?" Kiros asked, not unkindly.

"You ask me that every day-" Laguna complained.

"I ask you that once a day," Kiros said, nodding.

"-and you think I'm gonna give you a different answer?" finished Laguna. "This is my duty now. I'm not gonna walk away from it!"

Kiros produced a handkerchief and handed it to him. When Laguna looked befuddled by it, he sighed, took it, and flicked it at Laguna's paint-covered cheek until Laguna got the picture and started to clean himself. As he did so, Kiros said, "I ask you that every day to remind you that you're making the choice to do this. This is the life you're choosing right now. If you want to go back to Winhill-" and here he pointed at the unfinished painting again, "-then you should do that, even if she's not there anymore. We're with you no matter what you choose."

Laguna looked at him assessingly for a moment, then nodded. "Yeah," he said. "Thanks. But it's not to-to get back there that I'm doing this. Those days are done. I don't have anything left of them anymore, you know? Just the memory. And I guess I started to worry about what might happen if I lost that, too. I'm not getting younger. So I wanted to make the memory something I could touch."

Kiros looked up at the painting again. It was some nine feet above the floor.

"Well, something I could touch if I were standing on a ladder, anyway," Laguna said.

Kiros looked back at him, then looked at Ward. They both nodded. Something in Laguna un-knotted itself, as if in relief. His friends understood.

"Did you say you were going to add Moombas?" Kiros said, after a minute, as they strolled down to Laguna's office.

"Sure, why not?" said Laguna. He nodded at the sentries outside his door as they stepped inside the room and headed for his desk.

"I don't remember any Moombas in Winhill. It's not very accurate."

"Yeah, but I like 'em," said Laguna. "So I'm not the most realistic painter! I paint from what I've loved! I loved Moombas, and Elle, and Raine, and Winhill! So that's what's gonna go in there."

Ellone, feeling a surge of love for him in return, reflected that probably no one would be able to see the Moombas (or herself, or for that matter Raine) from nine feet down. From the look on Kiros's face, she could tell he was thinking the same. But he wisely didn't say this. Instead, he and Ward pulled up chairs and sat down to talk.

"Odine wants to open up the excavation site again," Kiros said, without preamble. "He's going to propose it to the Presidential Council. He thinks we don't know; he's been keeping it quiet because he doesn't want you making a move to oppose. We only found out because one of our aides intercepted a comm to the Council."

Laguna's brain whirred with confusion.

"Man, why does he want to do that?" he said. "Excavating all over the place! The last time his people were excavating, we ended up falling off a cliff. Anyway, so what? The Council won't allow it. That'll draw attention to Esthar; make people think we're still here."

Kiros and Ward looked at each other warily.

"We're not so sure the Council won't allow it," Kiros said. "They won't tell us for sure. But it looks like they think they could find more than they found last time."

"More of the Crystal Pillar?" said Laguna. "So what? Leave it down there. Who wants two of 'em? It's not like it's good for anything except destruction."

"Not another Crystal Pillar," Kiros clarified. "That came from the moon, and no, they don't want another one. But they think there could be other stuff. Stuff inside the earth."

Laguna opened his mouth. Then he closed it. He was silent, a rare occurrence for Laguna.

"Like what?" he said, after a minute. "What could possibly-"

"Don't you remember before the war?" Kiros said, somewhat impatiently. "Don't you remember what the Centra excavations were originally about?"

Laguna wracked his brain and, because Ellone was inside his brain, trying to figure out how to let him know she was there, how to communicate with him, she wracked his brain too. He hit on a memory before she could hit on a way of making herself known. He played through the memory. Ellone saw it as he did so.

Once, long ago, long before the defeat of Adel, long before Adel had even been a known menace, Laguna had enlisted in the army.

He couldn't afford school. None of them could. Not him, not Kiros Seagill, who lived above the main shopping arcade; not Ward Zabac, a large, slouching boy from the outskirts. They, like hundreds of other Deling City nobodies, couldn't afford to attend Deling City University, or even one of the smaller universities that had existed out in Timber and Dollet. They were poor kids; they were the children of stenographers, hotel maids, palace guards, or sanitation workers. They had happy enough childhoods, but aimless ones, always coming up short against the inescapable truth that their families lived paycheck to paycheck, and that there was no money for school; there wasn't even money to save up for school; all the money seemed to come in and melt away at the end of the day, spent on rent, on food, on things they just couldn't go without. School would have been a luxury.

But Ursula Deling's army had one thing going for it. If it didn't kill you, it would pay for your education. Ursula had liked the thought of education. We Fight For The Future, was the motto of the army in those days.

Laguna, of course, had wanted a future as a journalist. But in the days before the war there had been tons of journalists: a real glut on the market. So it paid to be qualified. You couldn't just pick up a pen and write something and submit it to a Timber publication; you had to go to school, and get a degree. And Kiros had it worse: he wanted to be an architect. That definitely called for schooling.

And Ward? Ward was entranced by the paleontological, archeological, fossilized life.

It was all over the news in those days. Deling City University was making great inroads then in the study of fossils and antique rocks, the imprints of creatures long-dead, ancient structures and ancient remains. Galbadia, like Esthar, believed it had a right to the history long-buried on the Centra continent. After all, hadn't several successive generations of fleeing Centrans made their home here, on this side of the world, in the Holy Dollet Empire? Esthar liked to say it was the true successor to Ancient Centra. But that wasn't true. Each time Ancient Centra had fallen (and it had fallen many times), its survivors had spread out all over, conquering and creating new homes. They didn't only go East; it was just that the East liked to pretend it had the best claim to Centra. But Deling City had also started setting up new outposts there, little townships of settlers in Western Centra, even as Esthar fed its people into corresponding villages in Eastern Centra. Little by little, the two great powers were initiating the next war: though not, as it had become under Adel, a war of magical succession. Instead it was a tense, step-by-step land grab. It was fight counted out in how many settlers each mother city could entice, how much of the free continent - the most magical continent - they could occupy. Many of these settlers were later killed: the first casualties of the war, their towns destroyed, their surviving children packed off to Galbadian and Estharian orphanages. And, in hindsight, anyone should have been able to guess that this would happen. Something had to give. Even back in Ursula Deling's time there had been small battles, border skirmishes between the two halves of Centra: the Estharian settlers attacking the Galbadians, the Galbadians attacking the Estharians.

And for what? Centra wasn't exactly beautiful. It was dry, rocky, and unforgiving. But it had, if you were willing to dig a little, treasures beyond comprehension.

The bones of ancient moon monsters, which, if refined, could make weapons deadlier and more powerful than any star fragments or screws could. The bones of ancient people, buried with books full of powerful knowledge, the knowledge of the moon, of the properties of crystal. Ancient houses, with their treasures inside still intact: elixirs more potent than any made today, draw points full of powerful spells; even, it was said, here and there items that looked like junk: antique buttons, ancient jewelry, aged pottery fragments. These things had value. You could sell them to a museum. Or, if you were lucky, if you found the right ones, you could do what a young doctor named Odine had thought up, and you could link your mind to them, and then you would find something incredible:

They were alive.

Guardian forces. The beastly ghosts of a long-dead civilization, full of power, capable of making anyone as - well. As powerful as a sorceress, as strong as her Knight, and as rich as a Deling, if you sold them to the right people, which was to say the already-strong ones. And they were said to be lying out down there in Centra for the taking. So people went to Centra in droves, and the lucky ones found GFs and took them home and sold them, and became gillionaires.

And that wasn't all they found.

"They can't want those GF things," Laguna said slowly. "We don't have anyone we want to fight. So it has to be-it has to be those shelters! The ones you were obsessed with, Ward! Remember?"

Ward did remember. Nodding ponderously, he reached into his robes and produced a piece of newspaper. How he'd gotten it, Ellone couldn't guess; but it was faded and yellowed, as though he'd kept it for a long time. He spread it out on Laguna's desk.

**Professor Bustamante Discovers Ancient Shelters**, said the paper.

Professor Nnamdi Bustamante of Deling City University claims to have discovered three of the shelters that transported Ancient Centran refugees to the shores of this and other continents. Bustamante and his students, who have been excavating on the Centra continent for the past year, announced on Friday that the three structures they recently transported from Centra to Deling City are, in fact, the fabled shelters. This announcement comes on the heels of last week's declaration by Dr. Lados Odine that the city of Esthar intends to find and reclaim the shelters, items of great cultural significance to the Estharians. Historical sources claim that the shelter technology did not originate with the last Centran refugee wave, but rather that the legendary Centra shelters were originally much older structures developed through intellectual collaboration with other ancient peoples, including the ancient Estharians. If this discovery is genuine, then sources in Esthar say it will cause great consternation for both Dr. Odine and the Royal Council of Engineers, even though research suggests that seven more shelters exist and are yet to be found. However, there is some dissent closer to home, as a university colleague disputes the find. Professor Florlina Drinnaks has already published a rebuttal stating that she believes the Centra shelters would not be found in Centra, but rather in modern-day Dollet, Esthar, or Trabia, where they were said to have transported refugees. br /

"She's batty and jealous. Obviously, some Centran survivors took these three shelters back home in order to bring back a new wave of refugees, only to be buried beneath the shockwaves of the second Lunar Cry blast. It's long-been an accepted theory, but now we have concrete proof that it isn't just theory, but reality," said Professor Bustamante's chief teaching assistant, [continued on page 13].

"Shelters," Laguna said thoughtfully. "Those were a pretty big deal, huh? The shelters. They tested them and everything, and found that they were pretty tough, right? It'd take nothing short of a direct missile strike to tear one apart, and they're supposed to be able to fly-"

"Interesting technology even to the Estharian eye," Kiros put in. "Or especially to the Estharian eye. Esthar knows how Esthar works. But they don't know how Centra did, and that drives some of the Council crazy. Some of them - they've been trying for years to replicate old stories with their inventions: nothing else!"

"Well, sure, but who's to say the shelters wouldn't be useful?" said Laguna. "I mean, what happened to the old ones? They're used as schools now or something, right? What's so bad about having a few schools of our own? Or learning how to make our buildings fly away from danger, saving everybody inside? Hey! We could have a whole flying city!"

The vision of it danced in his mind. A safe, mobile city. All the residents tucked up in wondrous floating shelters, dancing above the earth, soaring away from threats.

"Wow," Laguna said to the picture this produced.

Ward shook his head. Kiros smacked his forehead with one long-fingered hand.

"Laguna, you said it yourself. Do you really think the world wouldn't notice if Esthar started digging through Centra again? Do you think we could pull off a - a shelter excavation, even one closer to home, and not have the other places in the world sit up and realize we're still here?"

Laguna's city careened back down to earth with a plunk.

"Oh," he said, frowning. "Right. Well, probably the Council will consider that, right? We'll keep an eye on them to make sure they do."

And they did. Ellone, still unable to find a way to alert him to her presence, visited him every night for a week. And every night – which was really every day on the other side of the world, in Esthar – Laguna kept tabs on his Presidential Council. Only they weren't really his. They weren't really anybody's. They were the highest-ranking engineers in the city, that was all, the descendants of those who'd once made up the Royal Council; and though on paper they were elected to represent the average Estharian, in real life they tended to represent things like Science and Progress and the Economy.

Or at least they said they did. And Science called for a study of shelter technology. And Progress called for that, too. And the Economy, one Council aide revealed to the President, could only benefit. After all, even Esthar had its jobless and poor. And how grateful they'd be if they had jobs! Specifically, if they had jobs at the new excavation sites, in Centra, digging in the name of Science and Progress and the Economy.

"I'm not sure they would want that," said Laguna to the Council aide, sounding flatter and older than Ellone had ever heard him sound; sounding, in fact, completely unlike himself. "If they do, fine. But I've gotta be honest: I'm not sure you've asked them."

Nearly three million people lived in Esthar. It was the most densely-packed city on the planet. So it wasn't that Laguna thought it should be exposed. It was that he worried about exposing it without some kind of popular vote, some check with the people. Laguna had been made president because the Council, wanting to be free of Adel, had cast him as the people's hero. He'd felt bad about it at the time; it had seemed highly manipulative, a way of creating instant popular goodwill and instant peaceful accord by lying, essentially. He was no hero of Esthar. He'd only come to Esthar to be a hero of Ellone, and now, with Ellone long-vanished, he wasn't even that.

_But you are_, Ellone protested, inside his head.

"No," he told himself thoughtfully, as if in answer to Ellone. "No. I am. Not Elle's hero or Raine's hero, maybe. Maybe I can never be that again. But I tried to be what they said I was: a champion of this city. Because I didn't like lying about it! So I figured I'd just become it."

Only Laguna could have come up with such a simplistic way of viewing his position. And only Laguna could have made it work.

Alone in his office now, having banished the aide, he seized up some paper (which befuddled the Estharians, many of whom used fancy technological tablets and so viewed their President as something of an adorable buffoonish relic), and began to mark down names, addresses. Organizations like The Conservation Society of Northern Esthar and the Order of the Sacred Belhelmels and the Union of Estharian Librarians. He'd covered thirty-three pages by the time Kiros and Ward came in, and was still scribbling. Kiros picked up a page.

"You're forbidden from telling people what the Council's going to vote on," said Kiros. "You're not even supposed to know about it yet, anyway."

"What are they gonna do to me?" Laguna complained. "Put me in jail?"

"They did last time," said Kiros, causing Ellone to feel a jolt of worry and shock.

"It was house arrest, and it just meant I had to stay in the Palace, and it upset people," said Laguna. "People like me too much."

"I know," Kiros said worriedly. "The Council doesn't seem to like that, to be honest."

"Well, tough for them," said Laguna. "People like me because I'm a people person! I talk to people. And we have to know what the people want. What's a representative sampling, do you think? Three thousand?"

Kiros stared at him.

"Three hundred thousand?" Laguna said.

Kiros continued to stare.

"Three _thousand_ thousand?" said Laguna, shocked.

"What?" said Kiros. "No! That's not a number!"

Laguna shrugged.

"Either way," he said, dividing his papers up into three piles and smacking Kiros and Ward in the chest with one pile each. "We are taking our aides, and taking the issue to the streets!"

Ward stared at him gloomily. Kiros said, "You know, Laguna, when we first started doing stuff like this, I thought you were avoiding your palace duties. Or else going out to meet people to get information for an article. An expose on Esthar. Something to send home, to balance out TimMani's old allegiances."

"Nope," Laguna said cheerfully. "Just meeting my constituents. They're stuck with me, after all."

But they didn't seem to feel that they were stuck with him at all. As Ellone struggled to break through to him, he made appearances at Estharian restaurants and community spaces; met with people at the headquarters of professional organizations and at Estharian masonic lodges; traveled to old folks' homes, schools, markets and the main shopping arcade. He was cheered everywhere he went. Laguna had a remarkable ability to charm people. He always had, for as long as Ellone had known him. It was remarkable because he was so rough and coarse, really; he was the product of army mess halls and hours spent hanging out on Deling City stoops and in Deling City bars. Even Raine had complained about his lack of refinement often, though never with any real heat.

But in Esthar, what did they know about Deling City class markers? Nothing much. By Estharian standards, he was more curious than common. And every Estharian could tell that he had something essential, something wonderful: he was very genuinely interested in them. Poor old Estharian women complaining about their high air conditioning bills found an ally in him. So did irritable Estharian parents concerned with the state of the public school system. So did Salt Flats Preservationists who only wanted to talk about restoring the local environment. Even if Laguna couldn't promise them exactly what they wanted, he still at least listened and assigned one aide to every problem. His life now was - it seemed - an interminable series of problems, very small problems compared to the problem of exposing Esthar, but he seemed to understand, instinctively, that the smaller problems faced by his populace weren't small at all to them. He was capable of empathizing with the old Estharian cranks, the harassed mothers, the young men and women who threatened to tie themselves to rocks out on the Flats if the Council ever decided to bulldoze these natural wonders.

Ellone had always been able to slide into other people's heads. But she'd never really bothered with understanding them. Laguna did. Understanding and sympathy came naturally to him. Consequently, he was blanketed with admirers wherever he went.

He was also, she noticed worriedly, blanketed by aides all the time. His specific presidential aides, some of whom were carrying very specific weapons: tasers and spiked gloves, machine guns and para-magic dispensers. And there were other aides too, men and women watching from the edges of each crowd, and slipping away afterwards to report to other players. Odine. This Council.

Ellone had been very small when she'd last been to Esthar. She'd never gotten a real sense of the political landscape; terrified little girls weren't usually into that kind of thing. And so she'd always just assumed that Laguna would be fine. But he wasn't fine; not really. He was a figurehead trying to be a real head, and that was maybe the right thing to do (he wouldn't have done it if it didn't feel like the right thing to do to him), but it wasn't very safe of him.

He seemed to be making enemies.

But this was Laguna, and she'd never known him to be afraid for himself. He was the most instinctively brave man she'd ever known. So of course he paid no mind to the small signs that he was causing ripples. He stood on platforms in the shopping mall and conducted on-the-spot meetings, calling on the eager-seeming to ask why they wanted Esthar to open up, why they thought Esthar should stay closed. He scribbled down what they said, and showed little preference for one option or the other.

Though he hardly needed to; it seemed most run-of-the-mill Estharians preferred isolationism. Ellone wouldn't have been able to guess why, but then she didn't need to guess, because thousands of Estharians explained their reasons. Once Laguna began his information-gathering campaign, messages began to arrive at the Presidential Palace, sent on electronic waves to the President's inbox, or even just the old-fashioned way, typed out anonymously on paper and hand-delivered in droves.

"Mr. President, I am writing to say that I do not want us to go back to the days of Adel and this is what will happen if we do anything to draw attention to ourselves, because Esthar has always been a magical city and it is where sorceresses will come if they think they have the chance to. Respectfully, Anand Szormand."

"Dear President Loire, I hope you will take the podium at the next Council meeting and oppose the decision to begin excavations. I was a settler during the Adel War and supported the rise of Adel because I thought she would stop all the digging and let us go home. I have regretted supporting her all my life, but never regretted taking a stand for what I knew was right. Sincerely, Tobor Kaur."

"Dear Mr. President, I do not care about finding shelters inside the earth. In the days before Adel, my father was forced to dig for the Royal Esthar Mining Company. He died digging for Ancient Centran magical essences. They never sent us his body. Will finding shelters keep things like this from happening again? Freesia Reddy."

"President Loire, we have angered the rest of the world. We have killed. We have stolen children. We have destroyed the plains and the salt lake. These are Estharian crimes, maybe we deserve to suffer for them. But we have suffered too and our peace is hard won. If you don't oppose the Council, will they shatter our peace? Just some questions from, A Concerned Citizen."

"Well," Laguna said, three weeks and countless hours of work into the campaign. "Looks like I'm taking a stand."

"Looks like," Kiros said glumly, thumbing rapid-fire through a screen that showed 743 unread messages, as of that morning. Presidential aides all around the room were doing the same, instructed to note any deviations, to let the President and his advisors know if someone was in favor of the excavations. But they rarely found anyone in favor; the city had a long memory, and there remained a persistent fear of returning to Adel or to the past before Adel. Under Laguna, the Estharians couldn't leave their city without risking being cut off from it permanently, they couldn't learn anything of other places, they had only Esthar itself, now closed-off and largely powerless in the grand scheme of things, though once it had been a powerful place, a dominating place, sending tendrils of magic and suffering out over all the other continents.

With magic - with power - came suffering. That was something the Estharians knew well. And so they preferred no magic. No power. Just a quiet, closed-off peace. For this, Laguna was to be their spokesman.

"Remember not to speak too fast, or they'll say they don't understand you and make you repeat yourself," Kiros said, sighing. Next to him, Ward nodded.

"I didn't speak that fast last time! Roshan was just pretending I was. He wanted to see me sweat!"

"Try not to sweat. It was in all the papers last time and you looked like you'd been out in the rain because your collar was so wet."

"How can I help sweating?" Laguna complained. "Anyway, who cares if I look silly in the papers! As long as the message gets through!"

Kiros sighed again. "Don't muddle your message, come to think of it."

Laguna scowled, and vehemently protested because he never muddled his words, not ever, or at least not as much as Kiros and Ward liked to say he did, in fact he was as good as a Moogle with a pink nose-

"This is exactly what I mean," Kiros said patiently. "A Moogle with a pink nose? All their noses were pink-"

Laguna brandished a letter at no one in particular and said, "Right! So you see what I'm saying! I'm as good as anybody when it comes to talking! Except that I'm the one who's gotta do it, because I'm the President, and they can't all speak for themselves. Like this guy, here, 'A Great Admirer of the President,' imagine what this poor guy had to do to get us this letter. Found it on top of the pile this morning, and it's all wet, see? Probably with his tears, poor guy. It talks all about how they put in me in power because people felt like they didn't have any better options."

Ellone reflected that this didn't sound too admiring. Kiros and Ward looked skeptically at each other, apparently thinking the same thing.

"Poor guy..." Laguna said again, looking sadly down at the letter. It really was soaking wet; the ink had run together in places. Laguna had managed to decipher some of the writing - he could make out, for example, a whole paragraph at the end that charted his own rise to power, and he could make out the signature. But the beginning was enticingly vague and very blurry, and the ink and wet were now coating his fingers. Most of the aides hadn't wanted to touch this one; Estharian culture prized cleanliness, and Estharians wanted their fingers free of anything that could mess up a console or temporarily stain a vidscreen. But Laguna wasn't Estharian by birth and didn't care, and so he could always be counted on to pick the soggiest, saddest letters, and even to stick his hands in muck and wet for whatever reason - to fix an old lady's air conditioner down in the dank depths of the lower city, where the poorest and least technologically advanced lived. To troop down to the sewer system and investigate reports of bio-luminescent fish, survivors of the Salt Lake. In fact, these days he was well-known for a kind of cheerful messiness, had improbably acquired a city-wide reputation for bravery in the face of the disgustingly dirty and unpleasantly wet.

Now he lifted the letter up to his face again, trying to make out the text. It seemed to him to be maybe a history of Esthar, written lovingly by someone who cared a great deal for their city. This touched Laguna; he had, deep down, a vagrant's soul, and had never been particularly attached to Deling City. He never would have cried over a long missive to the Delings, for example, pleading for his voice to be heard in the political process. But then such a letter would have accomplished very little; the Deling City political process largely presumed that the process existed for the benefit of the Delings. But now he put himself in the shoes of this crying Estharian, whose tears had very liberally soaked the page.

_That's a lot of tears,_ Ellone thought, a little confused. The paper dripped on his fingers, and it was a marvel it was still holding together. Actually, it seemed a little impossible. How had someone managed to get it to hold water like that? Was it water?

Laguna squinted at the words on the page and inhaled sharply, biting his lip, trying to make the letter out. Ellone noted that Laguna's mind processed no smell associated with the paper, as though this really were water. But the liquid left no real stains beyond what it had done to make the ink run together. Even water would have left a stain, right? But then, it would have had to dry to leave a stain, and this paper was still soaking wet in places, the liquid running in rivulets down Laguna's arms now.

"That's a lot of tears for tears," Kiros said sharply, moving very quickly, shoving aides aside in his haste to cross the office and take the letter from Laguna.

Laguna didn't really notice; he could see Kiros moving only out of the corner of his eye, because he still had his face right against the page. He only felt a brief jolt of smugness when he heard Kiros's words. He said, "That's a lot of tears for _tears_? Ha! Who's muddling their words n-"

But he didn't finish.

At first Ellone couldn't explain it - what happened next. His gaze seemed to blur; his body seemed to become very heavy. She watched from inside him as he crumpled, he slumped against his desk, his head landing with a thud on the letters, the wet letter slipping out of his hands. But even as his body felt heavy, his mind didn't. A change came over him; he was suddenly very drowsy, she could tell, but his consciousness also seemed impossibly light. His - his _Laguna_-ness felt strangely free, unconfined, like the parts of him that were most him were suddenly un-tethered to his physical core.

It took Ellone a moment to realize what was happening. But of course she did realize. This was something she herself experienced every night. But for it to happen to Uncle Laguna like this? Who was doing it? Was it her? Was she doing it?

_No!_ she thought sharply._ No! I don't want to send him into the past! Not yet!_

But his body continued to droop, there in the office, surrounded by yelling aides, shadowed by Ward standing horrified above him, Kiros shouting for medical attention. And as his body drooped, his equally droopy mind continued to float hazily. Away from her. Away from himself. She couldn't say how she knew that this was happening; she simply knew that it was. But how could it be? Ellone was supposed to be the only person in the world who could do this to someone, and she wasn't doing it.

_Am I?_ she thought, horrified. _Am I doing this to Uncle Laguna?_

And, in response, Laguna's droopy brain thought, _...Elle?_

It was like whatever had done this to him had eroded the barrier between them. Ellone had been a silent, watchful specter perched in his brain, almost an un-invited GF or something, existing on a plain he couldn't touch and she couldn't move past. But now he was tugged onto that same plain, and in fact something was fast tugging him somewhere else entirely. Ellone recognized it instinctively; something was trying to push him out of himself, to leave his body a dreaming husk.

So, rather than explain herself to him, now that she and Uncle Laguna finally found themselves close enough to communicate, Ellone did one better. She grasped him mentally-

_You're doing_ what?_ How are you doing that?_ Uncle Laguna wondered, snapping back a little from his drowsiness.

-and she pulled him back. She didn't know where this-this other Ellone was trying to take him. But it seemed to her that it couldn't be anywhere good. So she wasn't going to let it happen. He was going to stay right here, here inside his own head, with his Elle. Where he belonged.

_What's my Elle doing inside my head?_ Uncle Laguna thought, apparently more interested in her than in the fact that someone was apparently trying to rob him of his mind.

_The Council says I've been losing it for years anyway,_ he thought cheerfully.

Ellone, still struggling to keep him connected to himself, thought that wasn't very funny.

_You know me, Elle. I have a bad sense of humor. Raine used to complain about it all the time, remember? But seriously: what are you doing here? I know Raine used to say you could do things, but this-_

Drained by the mental exertion of keeping herself inside his head, and keeping him inside his head, Ellone could only send some mild irritation his way. How could he think of that when he was in danger?

_Wow. So this is teenage grumpiness,_ Uncle Laguna thought back. _But my Elle is fifteen and three months and a week and two days, so I guess some teenage grumpiness is due her way._

Seriously. Scared, and upset, and struggling to protect him, Ellone couldn't believe that this was what he wanted to talk about. It would be better to talk about keeping him safe inside his own brain, and also about how somebody was out to get him.

_It's the Council's work_, Laguna said matter-of-factly. Then, at her spike of worry, he added, _But it's no big deal! Honestly. They've been a pain in the butt for a long time. I don't care about it much. I care more that I never knew what happened to you, Elle. I never knew if you were alive. I never knew if you were safe._

She felt the full force of his regret, his unhappiness, his pain. It hit her full on, slamming into her mind, and she almost lost her mental grip on him; almost, but not quite. She felt him pause at it, horrified that she could even feel his pain. But of course she could. They were eerily connected now, two rootless souls fighting to stay in his body, fighting to occupy his place in time.

Well. She was fighting. But it was easier to fight when she didn't know how much guilt he attached to her memory, how badly he'd missed her and how much he blamed himself for their separation. When all the while she'd been blaming herself.

_What_? Uncle Laguna said, horrified. He began to envision her alone, regretful, terrified, and the vision echoed inside him, called up his own regrets.

Ellone hastened to correct him. She didn't like to see him like this. While still fighting for mastery of him, trying to keep him out of the clutches of this mysterious not-Elle, she sent him happy memories of the old Elle. The Orphanage, mostly. That was where she'd been happiest. She sent him visions of racing with Seifer and Quistis on the beach, of helping Squall and Zell learn to read, of defending make-believe forts with Selphie and Irvine.

_Other kids, huh?_ Laguna thought, cheering up a little. _Hey! That's good! You always wanted other playmates, and there weren't many other kids in Winhill. And these kids seem like good kids._

_The best_, Ellone sent back reassuringly.

_So you're with them now? Is that it? They're still with you; you're not alone? You have this whole new family now?_

Ellone wished she could lie. But she couldn't; they were too closely linked now for that. So he saw instead that she wanted to lie, but couldn't, and he saw, too, the visions that came unbidden to her mind: the reasons she was here in the first place. Quistis out in Dollet, by herself, self-sufficient but horribly alone for all that, always found wanting by the Trepes, never loved. Irvine out in Deling City, wearing black at his adoptive mother's funeral, wilting under his adoptive father's gaze: another unwanted child. Selphie up in Trabia: very much wanted, but still waking at nights, screaming wildly for friends she couldn't remember. Zell in Balamb, loved and well cared for, but with so many loose ends in his life, always asking after the Orphanage, asking what about the other kids, what about them? Did they get homes too? When he was sent to Balamb Garden and was a soldier, would he finally be strong enough to look for them?

Seifer with that too-big gunblade, consumed by romantic daydreams, desperate to escape his regimented daily life; trying to reach out to Squall and finding him more closed off each day; Seifer, who was furious at it; Seifer, who was fast becoming mean.

And Squall. Squall, who could barely seem to remember the Orphanage, who was already desperate to fight and grow strong and shed every part of his old self, who was already junctioning. Squall, trying to be strong and failing.

_But they're just_ _kids_, said Laguna, horrified. _They're little kids. They can't be going through all that._

But they were. And she wanted to change it. For herself, for all of them, and especially for Squall.

_I'll do what I can!_ said Laguna, because of course he did. But Ellone, struggling to keep him inside himself, had a terrible epiphany.

Through Laguna's half-closed eyes, she saw Ward handling his body gently, lifting him up like he was nothing, carrying him through the halls of the presidential palace. Through Laguna's ears, she heard Kiros barking out terse, to-the-point commands, demanding that the Estharians send out for the best doctor - no, not Odine. Not him. Not anyone affiliated with the Council. This would require different help, to keep the president alive. And countless Estharians hopped to it. Ellone thought she saw a recovered Buday among them, even, looking frantic, worried. What would they do without their president? What could they do?

He's due to go before the Council tomorrow morning, someone said.

If he doesn't show, he'll lose all legitimacy, said another.

Who cares? wailed a third. Who cares? What if he dies? What will we do without him? How could this happen to him?

Laguna had a whole family of his own. Three million strong, practically. Who relied on him. Who needed him to stay in his own body, who couldn't have him running off to rescue some children, who almost certainly couldn't have him falling asleep on the job, whirled away into the past.

_Elle-_ Laguna said, sounding aborted, painful. _Elle, is that what you wanted? Is that what you needed my help with?_

But Ellone, ashamed, acted almost on instinct, and pulled him back inside himself harder than ever. And then she did one better, she shoved him into place. Back to where he was supposed to be. She couldn't explain how she did it; she just did it. Laguna belonged in his own body, in Esthar, with his new duties. Not with her. She'd lost him. She felt that very keenly and horribly. So she did the right thing, and she restored him to the people who had taken him from her: the people of Esthar.

In Esthar, Laguna opened his eyes. Ward saw him do it first, and stopped short. Kiros walked into him, still shouting out orders, then caught sight of Laguna and called out his name.

"Elle," Laguna said mournfully in response. "Elle was here."

Worried, Kiros called for Buday and told him and the other assembled aides that they still needed the doctor. The President seemed out of it.

"No. No, I'm back inside myself," Laguna told everyone, leaving them all befuddled. He struggled to stand. Ward let him, but refused to let go of his arm and ended up propping him up.

"Elle was here," Laguna said again, simply.

And Elle stayed there, as long as she felt the force that was trying to undo Laguna, to rob him of himself. It was some time until that force faded away. So Ellone stayed with him all through the night, no longer trying to reach him, no longer feeling that she had the right. Just keeping him safe, keeping him in place, as he was taken to his room, as he waited for a doctor, as Kiros and Ward looked over him skeptically and seemed to decide that he'd been hallucinating. She stayed all through that night. She stayed when the doctor finally arrived - a trusted refugee from Trabia, apparently, with no love for the Council, who explained that what Laguna described was something out of an old story, almost, but that even those things had their cures, and could be prevented if he took the right measures. She stayed the next morning, as Laguna shakily made his way to the Council hall and took the podium.

Then she left. There was nothing inside his brain anymore; the not-Elle was gone. And the real Elle had begun to realize that she had no right to be there, either. She would have to find another way to change the past. She would have to find other people.

* * *

Of course, eventually she had. But now, hurrying through the halls of the presidential palace, she had to reflect that her later attempts had been just as presumptive as her first attempt. Her powers had gotten stronger, her aims clearer, her subjects less likely to be abandoning an entire nation full of people.

But she'd still been meddling with other people's lives. And with time itself. Purely because she'd been unhappy. And she'd been doing this even though she knew how horrible that could be, knew that powers like hers could be used for great evil.

"But this time," she told herself firmly. "I'm not responsible. It's-it's the other Ellone."

Because there was another Ellone. Ellone had never visited Laguna's head again, terrified that the other Ellone had been drawn to him somehow by her presence. But that one visit had proven it: at least one other person had her powers and wasn't afraid to use them for their own ends.

She reached the corridor a little ways down from Laguna's office door. He was inside, sequestered on an important vid call with the Galbadians. He didn't trust many people to communicate with the Galbadians; the Council could, of course, but they were old men and women mired in old prejudices, and when it came to dealing with someone like Fury Caraway, who was said to be much the same, Laguna worried that they might do more harm than good. So Ellone just stood outside, twisting her hands anxiously, not wanting to interrupt.

But still. She had to. Squall was in trouble.

Above her head was the great finished painting of Winhill. Above her head danced a young girlish Elle, Moombas played hopscotch, Raine waved at any important visiting dignitaries. Ellone couldn't see them from all the way down here. But she knew they were there. Ellone glanced up at the painting, willing it to give her courage. Then she stepped down the length of the corridor, nodded at the sentries, pushed open the door and stepped inside. Uncle Laguna was at his desk with the great panoramic window behind him, looking tired. Kiros was on his right; Ward on his left. Various aides spilled out on all sides, taking notes and passing missives to the president through their tablets, which Fury Caraway, displayed on the president's vid screen, wouldn't be able to see.

They seemed to be discussing the problem of Garden. Laguna personally didn't find Garden much of a problem at all, of course; he seemed to think it was no better or worse than any other military group. And many Estharians rather liked Garden, for now, because Garden was helping clean up Lunar Cry monsters that had become trapped on the upper, more moneyed levels of the city. But they also associated Garden with the Lunar Cry in general; it had been a Garden skirmish that had pre-empted it, and a former Garden cadet who was personally responsible. So, politically, Laguna was expected to have reservations about Garden, and politically he did, because politically he wasn't his own man: he belonged to Esthar.

But something had happened to his son, down in Garden. His son was in trouble. Surely that was important too? Or did it not matter, now that Squall had one life, and Laguna another, and nothing Ellone did could manage to bring them together?

Laguna looked up when there was finally a lull in Fury Caraway's diatribe about Garden perversion spilling into Deling City. He caught Ellone's eye.

It's Squall, Ellone mouthed. He's... Someone's taken him out of his head. Not me.

Fury Caraway started talking again. Distracted, his face suddenly wild, Laguna didn't bother to look down at the vid screen this time. The General responded to this rather sharply, said something about trumped-up former army men that Ellone herself didn't bother to note but that made Kiros scowl and retort and tug at Laguna's sleeve to make him pay attention.

"Wha..?" Laguna said. "Oh. Oh, right. Listen, Fury, can I call you Fury-"

"-no, President Loire, you cannot," was General Caraway's cool reply.

"-oh. Alright. That's sad," said Laguna, not cowed. "Listen, my thought has always been that we've gotta open communications with them like they're any other country-"

"-they're not a _country_," Fury Caraway said, disgusted. "They're a bunch of underage mercenaries, nothing more."

"Political entity, whatever," said Laguna. "We're not gonna stamp 'em out. They're here. We've gotta deal with them above-board. Like we do with each other. So that's what I'm gonna do!"

"...what?" said Fury Caraway.

"That's what I'm gonna do," said Laguna. "And I will keep you posted! Honesty, that's the best policy. Open communication. With words, we can all understand each other!"

"I'm sorry: are you shouting slogans at me?" Fury Caraway said slowly.

"They're good, right?" said an unconcerned Laguna. "And I am taking in your Garden concerns, and man, do I wanna talk to them and see if I can figure out what's going on there. That's what I'm going to do! For all of us! For the world! Well, this has been a great call. Same time next week? Good. Bye!"

And, not caring about Kiros and Ward tiredly shaking their heads at him, he cut the call to Galbadia. Ellone stared at him a little warily as he skirted the aides and came around to greet her. She thought maybe he'd turned out pretty good at municipal governance. But foreign policy? Not his strong suit.

"What is it?" he said in a low voice when he reached her. "What's happened to Squall?"

"I-" Ellone began, feeling suddenly stupid. "Shouldn't you worry about Esthar? About your work here? I just wanted to tell you, but I think there isn't a lot we can do, so-"

_So shouldn't you worry about yourself? About the life you built here, away from me and Squall? About what might happen to you if it ever looks like you're not the hero Esthar needs? About what might happen to you if it looks like you_ are?

Laguna looked down at her, smiling a little sadly.

"Even if there's nothing I can do, Elle," he told her, ignoring the frantic meeting going on behind him, the aides hurrying to put together memoranda designed to smooth over his faux pas, "Even if there's nothing I can do, I have to try. It's better than living with regret."

He seemed to be staring at something over her head. The wall beyond the wall, the corridor he couldn't see, the place where the painting was. He seemed to see clear through all the physical obstacles, seemed to be thinking up the vision he'd painted.

"I think anything," he added thoughtfully, "Is better than living with regret."


	16. Chapter 16

Back in Balamb, Zell paced the length of the small examination room. His thoughts felt like they might leak out of his ears. He felt like he might close his eyes and open them and be someone else - be Raijin. He didn't want that. Another little trip to the past, to Raijin's head, or to Ward Zabac's. Picking up miscellaneous emotions: Raijin's fear for his sister and best friend, Ward's loneliness. Zell didn't carry either of those things inside himself, and he didn't like being forced to take them on. So. He paced. The medical intern looked at him, confused, and gestured helplessly towards the bed. Zell ignored him.

Quistis was right. She had to be right - she was one of the smartest people he knew. So she was undoubtedly right about this too: Zell was supposed to have learned something from his little head jaunt. Something important, like how Ward had taught him how to operate certain controls in the D-District. But what could Raijin show him? That Raijin himself was in trouble. Fine. Zell would help him; he'd said he would. What else? That Seifer Almasy had a human side. Also fine. That changed nothing. You could have a human side and still terrorize whole cities, order missile strikes that killed hundreds of people, feed your ex-girlfriend to Adel.

"Um," said the medical intern. "So. You're Zell Dincht."

And Zell said, "Yep," and then, without even really thinking about it, "Great diagnosis."

The intern had a baby-roundness to his face, very clean fingernails, a diamond stud in his ear, and a stiff white collar. He was probably one of these new recruits who'd come to Garden after the war. They had all kinds of easy, soft, high-class Estharian recruits coming in now, kids who'd grown up under Laguna's tenure as president and who'd always had everything. They felt un-Garden-like. The Garden old guard was - well. Kids with nothing but Garden, for the most part. Zell had been one of the few cadets in his year to have a home outside of Garden, and his home had been one of the nicest you could find for Balamb: Ma and Pa's cozy, colorful little den on Main Street. People had made fun of him for it. Loudmouth Dincht, a celebrity in town with all those weak townie types, who had parents to fuss over him, who got name day gifts and food in the mail.

Zell used to get really annoyed over it. It had been so unfair, that people thought less of him just because he hadn't had the least you could possibly have. But in hindsight he realized that it was probably their jealousy speaking, and anyway it wasn't such a big deal. No matter what people thought of him, he was loyal to his Garden. True. Used to its odd quirks, flexible enough to bend to its rules, always willing to stick to the mission. He loved B-garden. He might mistrust Cid, might find some of Garden's aims - in hindsight - deeply messed up. But in terms of day to day life, he thought Garden was a pretty good place, overall.

But now it was a little different. Cosmopolitan recruits were trickling in, padding the coffers with their parents' gil, going home every weekend in sleek silver airships, signing up to learn things like medicine and business management. Not enough of them for Xu to listen to any arguments against their admission. They did fill the monetary hole left by the defeat of NORG, and after all, it wasn't like it would be fair to deny them a place here just because they had homes to begin with. But still. There were just enough of them to make a kid from Balamb look like the yokel he really was, just enough to change the dynamic of the school, to stand out a little too much and make it clear how unfortunate everyone else was by comparison.

Zell didn't know how to feel about that.

"Um," said the intern. "Well. The mission report Instructor Trepe gave said you had a sleep spell of some kind on you-"

No. That was inaccurate. Zell doubted it said anything of the kind, because he'd fallen asleep naturally, and Quistis would have noted that because Quistis did her job well: she was a pro.

"-so I'm gonna cast Esuna, so hold still-"

"I'm awake now," Zell said shortly.

"What?" said the intern.

"I'm. Awake," Zell said. "Esuna isn't going to wake me up. I'm awake. And-"

Did he even know what he was doing?

"-yo, do you even know what you're doing?"

The intern looked petrified by the question. He was - Zell realized - really young-looking. He was probably Zell's own age, maybe a little younger, maybe sixteen or seventeen. But _Zell _didn't look young. Or at least Zell didn't think he did. He was all muscle: people had to take him seriously just for that. Meanwhile this guy was soft and skinny all at once, primped and polished, not right for Garden at all. Zell promptly felt irritated by him, but also a little bit sorry.

That was how people like Seifer and Raijin had always seen him, right? As not right for Garden. Not a real fighter. Cowardly and likely to piss his pants, short and pathetic, nowhere near the caliber of your standard Garden kid.

Well, he'd proven them wrong, hadn't he?

"The report said the problem began when you went to sleep," the intern was stammering out, "And-and I thought...well, I'm not taking field classes-"

"-of course you aren't," Zell said, rolling his eyes.

The intern flushed. "That's. I. That's really sarcastic. They said you were a nice guy!"

"I am a nice guy," Zell said slowly.

He tried to be. Tried to be friendly, at least. Not too friendly. He wasn't like Selphie, sunny and overwhelmingly charismatic even at her scariest. He couldn't get away with that. There was no streak of delightful girly darkness to Zell; he had to be tough inside and out. But he at least tried to be real with people, and fair to them. And this kid didn't know what he was doing, so-

So it wasn't like Zell was treating him a little like how the DC had treated Zell, That was ridiculous.

Trouble was: now Zell was comparing himself to the DC in every little way. He'd shared a brain with one of them, been connected to the guy. It scared him; now he had to wonder if more than just the momentary Ellone-link connected them, if he and Raijin really were similar people. Is you responded the same way as someone else, did it even matter then that you were yourself and they were themselves? Or did the common ground keep a link in place?

"I guess I just thought one of the heroes of the world would be a little more patient and heroic, that's all," the intern was now saying stiffly. "I'm going by my mission report. That's what I'm supposed to do."

And then he showed Zell his clipboard and, sure enough, no one had bothered to tell him a lot. The notes looked to be in Nida's hand, and they said, "Sleeping? A sleep spell? Z wetting the bed?" and then there were scattered notations on the Ancient Centrans. Annoyed, Zell punched the examination table.

"Wetting the bed?" he said. "Come _on_."

"I didn't think that part was true," the intern confided. "I remember when I saw you fighting Lunar Cry monsters. I thought you were so cool, and-"

Zell ignored him. That explained it. Nida, man. Screw Nida. Making Zell out to be that weak, that pathetic - a little bit of _sleep _wasn't the real problem. The problem was:

"Ellone yanked me out of my head again," he told the intern. "That's what happened, okay? I wasn't some little kid having a nightmare. I was trapped in somebody else's brain!"

"...Ellone?" said the intern.

Crap. He shouldn't have said that. Ellone's powers weren't common knowledge. Especially not to anyone from Esthar, where she was practically a princess in residence, the President's long-lost adoptive daughter. Though Laguna hadn't actually told anyone to lie about her powers. That wasn't Laguna's style. But still, as almost a courtesy, no one who knew about her - not Cid, not Edea, not the White SeeDs nor the Orphanage Gang - had come forward and said anything about what she could do. They'd let her escape to Esthar, to her happily-ever-after with the only guy who'd ever really looked out for her, and kept moot about the whole creepy powers thing. When the public knew about your creepy powers, a real happily-ever-after wasn't possible. Rinoa was proof of that.

But now Ellone was meddling with them again and she was refusing to return Squall to the waking world. So a part of Zell regretted blurting her name out, but another part of him was unrepentant.

"What do you mean, she yanked you out of your head?" said the intern slowly.

"Nothing," Zell said, waving one hand very fast like this could wave away his slip-up. "Forget about it. It's above your paygrade. SeeD stuff."

"Right," said the intern, like he thought Zell was losing it. "Excuse me a minute. I-uh. Forgot something in the other room. I'm going to go get it. Now." He put the clipboard down and looked like he was trying to edge out of the room. Probably Zell should let the guy think he was crazy - that would get him out of Zell's hair - but he found he had too much pride for that. It wasn't fair that Elllone messed with his head, and he ended up looking like the nutcase in the situation.

"Yo, I'm not crazy!" Zell said, before the intern could escape.

"You said you were trapped in someone else's brain," the intern said slowly.

"I-" Zell began.

Dammit. Frustrated, he punched the table again. The clipboard bounced up as if in answer. The intern gave him another scared look and edged out of the room.

Fine. Let him go. Zell waited a few seconds and then followed. In the main infirmary office, Selphie, Rinoa, and Irvine had their heads together, discussing something. Zell came up to them, sat down, and said, without preamble, "We've gotta talk. Something's happened to Seifer Almasy."

He would have said 'Raijin', because he liked Raijin a lot better than Seifer by now, but he picked Seifer's name instead because that was in Basic Training Manual VI. In a mission briefing, you prioritized names, dates, and facts according to relevance, and relevance was judged according to the task at hand, and the task at hand was set by the client. Raijin was - in a weird way - his adopted client now. The mystery Zell had agreed to take on. And Raijin would have framed the story to give deference to Seifer.

If Zell found Raijin alive, he was gonna sit the guy down and explain to him, very plainly, just what he thought giving deference to Seifer was good for. Raijin would probably be shocked to hear it, because he was kind of stupid about Seifer. But Zell didn't care; someone had to tell the guy. And he'd been building up a vent about Seifer for years with no real audience, so he'd take a shocked audience if it came to that.

But, weirdly, he had a shocked audience right now. Selphie, Irvine, and Rinoa were all staring at him like he'd said the last thing they expected him to.

Well, of course he had. They weren't used to him caring about Seifer; that was all. Because he didn't care about Seifer. He just cared about doing what was right.

"Ellone whammied me too," he told them, jerking his head in the direction of the room where Quistis and Dr. K were fussing over Squall. Rinoa looked stricken by this. She was twisting her hands in her lap. Zell felt for her, but plunged on nonetheless: "I saw some stuff. About Seifer, about the DC. I was startin' to tell Quistis when we pulled into Balamb. I think it's stuff we've gotta deal with."

And then, taking a deep breath, he launched back into the story.

* * *

Truthfully, the intervening years at Balamb were somewhat boring for the DC. No one was more shocked by this than Zell. They'd always seemed to be doing important and exciting things, those three. Always seemed to be striding here and there, lounging here and there, scarily standing in a huddle here and there. Faces haunting the edge of his consciousness at strange moments, popping up to give him a citation for something dumb like accidentally t-boarding into the women's restroom. Zell had always encountered them at emotionally heightened moments, moments when he himself was furious to find them extending his humiliation, and so he'd always assumed that they lived lives of great emotion, huge rage, powerful excitement.

At least they'd always seemed to want to give others that impression.

But, actually, they'd spent a lot of time training. And studying. All three of them took lots of classes: one semester they all took Basic Combat VII, Munitions, Close Combat, Ranged Combat, Political Science, Ancient Centran, Dolletian History II, The History of Timber, and, weirdly, an Entomology elective taught by some excitable university professor Cid had scrounged up who was an expert in Bite Bugs, because Raijin liked bugs. They obtained special permission from Cid for the courseload; Cid was always very indulgent with them. They all struggled, but Seifer and Fujin proudly refused to complain. Only Raijin made something of a nuisance of himself, falling into his bed dramatically every night in their shared dorm and making Seifer and Fujin roll their eyes at him.

They had one of the rare three-room dorms. Of course they did. Fujin shouldn't have been rooming with the boys but, as far as Zell could tell, Cid didn't seem to care. The DC were all good enough students, even if Seifer had a tendency to talk back to teachers and flatly deny orders he didn't like, and even if none of them would condescend to wear the uniform, and even if all of them liked to gang up on Zell. Even with all that, for the most part they performed their committee duties well enough and were impressive enough fighters to make the school look good. They were photographed standing around talking for several brochures. Zell remembered standing near them on one of these occasions, convinced that Seifer - who'd just bought that stupid coat of his over the summer and was preening in it all over Garden - had somehow orchestrated the photo op, and that they were secretly discussing awful things about everybody, and that the photo was set up expressly to record their utter contempt for all people. Maybe they'd even been talking about their renowned list, their list of people who, Zell had been convinced then, would be first against the wall when Seifer finally made SeeD and Cid was stupid enough to hand him real power.

But it turned out that the list was really just a list of people they'd decided they would have nothing to do with. That was it. A list of people they'd no longer be talking to, instructors they'd no longer offer bothering to defend to Cid, Shumi guardians they'd no longer run to support in Disciplinary Hearings. It was a list, in short, of people who'd hurt Seifer Almasy's feelings one too many times. A list of people they were planning to ignore, though they didn't call it ignoring; Seifer had grandiose ideas about his place in the world, and thought not being graced by his presence was some kind of punishment.

If Zell had known this, he would have gotten himself on the list a long time ago; he really would have.

And actually, all those years ago they'd really been talking about the the political model of eleventh-century Timber. Or Seifer had been talking about it. Timber as described in the romantic literature of pseudo-Knight and Moogle activist Dovi, about the potential connections between the Knights of old and the vanished communities of the Moogles, about whether these bonds ever could have survived in a universe without the environmental changes that later wiped out the Moogles. His friends had been indulging him. Zell figured it was a pretty massive indulgence on their part.

Who could ever have guessed that this guy could be so boring? Zell had been staring so resentfully at him across the quad, and for what? Seifer was, improbably, as dead uninteresting as he was downright unlikable. If Zell had been expecting secret late-night cabals, detailed plans for world domination, and scrolls with the names of future Garden coup victims written in blood, he was sorely disappointed. The DC had just spent those years becoming closer, cementing the odd bond that had sprung up between them in FH. And they also spent those years becoming - if possible - the three dullest people in Garden.

("Alright. So they're hot nerds," Irvine said. "We get it. Check. Can you get to the point?"

"...you think they're hot?" Selphie said.

"I think everyone's hot?" said Irvine.

"No, you don't," said Selphie matter-of-factly. "You just say you do. Oh my god! You think they're hot! Even Raijin?"

"What are you- I mean. Especially Raijin," said Irvine, evidently glad to be bantering with her in this playful manner.

"Can we get to the point, please?" said Rinoa, still glancing anxiously at the room where Squall lay.)

Alright, alright. So Zell would skip over those years, even the sort of surprising parts, like what they'd done over the summers-

("I know that," said Rinoa quickly.

"Sure, but we don't!" said Selphie. And then she added, a little evilly, a little like she was riling someone - though who she was riling, Zell couldn't guess, "Were Seifer's summers embarrassing? Tell us every detail! Leave no stone unturned! What did his moments of complete humiliation look like?")

Zell would have loved to go into detail on that, but they'd already seen it. The Ultimecia War. Obviously the worst period in Seifer's life, though he'd brought it on himself; and, more importantly, the worst period in Raijin Dobe's life, and that was saying something because Raijin had grown up in Fisherman's Horizon.

And after the war, they'd gone back to Fisherman's Horizon.

("Of course!" said Selphie, punching the air eagerly in a triumphant booyaka move. "Where they couldn't be tried for anything, and where we wouldn't have gone looking for them!"

"Well, I don't think we wanted to look for them," said Irvine. "I mean, Matron kept hinting-"

"What, seriously?" said Selphie.

"Yeah, to me and to Quistis and to Squall, too, though I don't think he picked up on it, because when he wants to close his mind to something, boy, he does," said Irvine. He spoke carefully, strangely. It was like he was addressing someone he couldn't see, like he wanted this invisible person to know these things.

Selphie said, "But. I mean. FH. C'mon. We'd never go back there unless we had to. It's basically hobo town."

And Rinoa said, "Let. Zell. Speak."

And they shut up, looking at her worriedly; and, because of the way she'd spoken, Zell wanted to shut up too. She seemed different somehow. He noticed it now; it was more than her clear agitation over Squall. There was something awful about her face; awful and perfect, like someone had laid a film of cellophane over her features and now they were waxy, white, and disturbingly beautiful.

She was beautiful, he guessed, if you were into that kind of thing. But she wasn't supposed to be beautiful like this.

Zell swallowed hard, and spoke.)

After the war, things changed. Raijin had an in with the Master Fisherman, so he got them set up at the FH hotel; better to go there than to bring a disgraced sorceress' knight direct to Mayor Dobe, who would only be disapproving and insufferable. It wasn't comfortable living; three people, two of them quite large, stuffed into one three-bed bunk. But they'd lived in close quarters for years now anyway, and they'd all been trained to suffer worse indignities, to camp in tough places, to resist interrogation, to sweat out awful conditions if a mission required it. So the banal, cramped ugliness of their room in FH didn't bother them. Fujin and Raijin had always been perfectly comfortable with the banal, cramped ugliness of FH in general anyway; it was the pacifism that bothered them, not the locale. And Seifer was perfectly capable of escaping into his own head, and fulfilling his romantic needs there.

Seifer had always been good at this. After the war, he'd seemed to become even better at it. Too good at it, really.

He had, in his mind, a Gallery. That was how he'd started to describe it. He could draw it, even, on sheets of loose engineers' computation paper. He would go with them during the days to fish - this was how newcomers to FH kept fed, of course, and how the cowed DC now earned their keep: selling fish to tourists who wanted to hike across the trans-oceanic rail to Esthar. He would seem to be nothing more than himself then. Still too proud to be living the way he was, still a little bullying, good at hectoring passing tourists until they caved. A little humiliated, maybe, but never ready to admit it, and in this very much his old self.

But by nightfall he would be through with this calm, mundane living. And he would begin to speak of the Gallery. Fujin and Raijin had heard about the Gallery before, of course; Seifer's mental panoply of Knights was something that Zell felt - with some sympathy - these two had unfortunately heard too much about. But before it had been nothing more than a succession of stories, a collection of everything Seifer had snatched from old books and reassembled into an ad-hoc dream, a way of making his life bigger and more interesting than it was.

Now he seemed to think it was a real place. And it didn't sound like a nice one.

"Neve and Romulus were like this," he'd say to himself, standing over his frenzied scribbles, his complex sets of notes, "Facing each other. Stuck lookin' at each other, I guess, even though they were rivals-"

"STUCK," Fujin would repeat blankly, from her bunk.

"Doesn't sound too great, ya know?" Raijin would tell him slowly, coming over to try and pull him away, night after night, from the project that seemed to sap more and more of his energy. "The way you say it: it's like they're assembled for somethin', ya know? But for what? Why are they all just standin' there? It's weird, ya know? I guess it's a metaphor or somethin-"

"It's not like that," Seifer said savagely, dangerously. "It's real. And that's how they're meant to be. Locked in combat. It's honorable. It's their conflict, preserved. Memorialized. You wouldn't understand."

The days of Seifer understanding that Knights' tales were mere metaphor were over. Long over. Seifer had lived the metaphor, become the cautionary tale. It seemed something in him had snapped at it.

He'd been very fastidious once. Very good about his appearance, always running a hand over his hair to smooth it, always tugging at the sleeves on his coat when he thought no one was looking, just to straighten them. Hyne, he'd worn a white-grey coat everywhere, and yet had always seemed to emerge without a single stain on the thing. He'd always been, in his own way, obsessive even about his looks. Raijin remembered how the scar Squall had given him had annoyed him with it's slight off-centerness. It wasn't the scarring that Seifer minded. It was how unbalanced the thing looked: _Squall_, he'd complained, had been privileged to be scarred by a master, and so Squall had gotten away with a much neater, straighter line of scar, and that was intolerable: that Squall's scar enhanced his appearance, while Seifer's was a little draggy, a little imperfect, a scar dealt by a comparative neophyte.

Well, the neophyte had bested him at last. And it left him changed. Raijin had painstakingly mended his coat after the war, but Seifer would shrug the thing off on a pier and leave it there, forgotten, like he hadn't scraped together fourteen-hundred gil over three years to have it custom-made. He'd once been aggressively clean, always picking away the dirt that collected under his nails during Training Center sessions, frowning at the thought of any filth on him. Now he forgot to shower if he wasn't reminded, and let mechanic's oil and grime collect on his sleeves and hems. And, like a good Balamb champion, healthy living had once been his mantra: he'd never stooped to eat even the famed Balamb Garden hot dogs, had always been the first to say, stridently and arrogantly, that anything that contained mystery meat was almost certainly nothing that should go into a true fighter's body.

Now he ate anything, anytime anyone offered it, without even caring what was in it. Partly this was because he wasn't being fed by Garden anymore. But mostly it was because, unless someone offered him food, he would just go without it. He seemed to have reached a point near the end of the sorceress war where he hadn't eaten anything much; though he never spoke of his time with his sorceress, his friends guessed that his thoughts had been too consumed with Ultimecia to think of eating, and Ultimecia hadn't bothered to remind him. Now that she was gone, he didn't seem to have recovered his old self fully. He was still, in some ways, trapped with her. He had his old way of moving back, his old prowling step, the haughty way he held himself up. But he used it to propel himself into odd corners: instead of leading the way, he would hang behind his friends, and then Fujin and Raijin would turn to find him gone, and he'd turn up in unexpected places: out-of-the-way piers where he would be deep in conversation with the Master Fisherman over a card game he was sure to lose, because he wasn't paying attention to it. Or by the abandoned traincar, talking urgently to Martine, who lived there now. Or over in the Grease Monkey's house on the edge of town, discussing something with his head bowed, his eyes darting to the side, like it was a secret.

It wasn't a secret. He would bluster a bit, give that same haughty smile he'd always given people he wanted something from. But eventually the smile would crack, and he'd get down to asking the same two questions he asked everyone these days.

One: had they heard of the Gallery?

Two: what did they know about _down_? What did they think lay beneath the sea, beneath the very earth?

The people of FH, because they were kind people, were kind about him. Flo told her annoyed stepchildren, with tears in her eyes, that she thought he was very probably not the wisest or most admirable boy, but not really bad, underneath it all. The fisherkid wouldn't hear a word against him, the poor guy. Even Mayor Dobe was soon stopping by the hotel to greet him kindly, carefully, with a patronizing solicitousness that would have made Seifer rage, in earlier days, but that now he scarcely seemed to notice. The consensus seemed to be that Seifer Almasy, ex-Knight, hadn't warred against the world to the death, hadn't succumbed to the grand, bloody, violent end that awaited most Knights. Instead, in a peaceful and FH-approved manner, he'd very quietly gone completely, harmlessly crazy.

The trouble was: Fujin and Raijin had always known he was a little crazy, and had even seen him go so far off the deep end that he wasn't himself anymore. This wasn't anything like that. This seemed to be a new form of Seifer, a third stage. As obsessive and committed to his dream as he'd been originally, but with all the sad unraveling that had come later. He was supposed to snap back to himself, and he had, a little. But not entirely. Ultimecia, the fight against Garden, Time Compression - all the worst moments of his past had blanketed him like a chrysalis, obscuring his old self from view for a time. And when he'd emerged, it wasn't quite the same him anymore.

They resolved to get him to a bigger city, where there would be doctors who might help him. They discussed it with their father. Mayor Dobe told them plainly that he didn't think anyone would help Seifer these days: the boy was very probably wanted in Deling City for his crimes, and in Esthar too, and in Balamb, and wouldn't it be kinder, really, to let him live peacefully in FH? If a mob came for him here, he could die a pacifist. Yes, a pacifist.

"And so, you see," he told his children calmly at lunchtime in his sunlit office, "You may have left to be with him, but in the end he came here. To be as all people should be. At peace."

"FUCK THIS," Fujin said, standing up and leaving without another word.

"Yeah, we love you, dad, but you're the worst, ya know?" said Raijin.

So instead they puzzled it out between themselves, trying to think of a place, any place, that might take Seifer. Any place he hadn't antagonized. Sadly, there seemed to be nowhere that wouldn't hate him: Winhill, maybe, but Winhill had no medical specialists they could think of, no one with enough knowledge to take a stab at fixing Seifer's unraveling mind.

"The Shumi Village is below the surface, according to the Grease Monkey," he'd say to himself, late into the night. "And Martine says in Deling they have buildings with networks that connect to the sewers, underground buildings. And the Master Fisherman says there used to be excavations in Centra. In Centra. It's gotta be that. Gotta be Centra. Most magical continent, Centra."

And one day he very simply told them that he was leaving.

"CAN'T," Fujin said, panicky.

"Seifer, where are you gonna go, ya know? You've got a bounty on your head in three major cities, ya know?" Raijin pleaded.

But he hadn't found what he was looking for in FH. He only had tantalizing hints: a patchwork of theories about where the imaginary Gallery might lie, where the Knights might rest, where his Guardian might meet him at last. Fujin and Raijin, who understood this Guardian to be only a figment of Seifer's mind, some mechanism for redemption that he himself had created, looked at him despairingly.

He leaned against the table in the hotel where he'd spread out all his notes. His hands were covered in pencil smudges. He hadn't shaved and he had the beginnings of a beard; he looked wholly unlike himself. He shrugged one shoulder carelessly and said, "You don't have to come. You shouldn't, really. If I'm jailed, I'm jailed. If I'm killed, I'm killed. But I'm not gonna let either of those things happen to me."

A traditionally Seifer sentiment. They might have trusted in it more if he hadn't let a sorceress carve up his mind. Unfortunately, he had, and now they could no longer have faith that he'd be strong enough to weather whatever came his way, and to win against it.

So, to protect him, they went with him. And, for the first time in their lives, they imposed some basic rules on him. He would travel only at night. He would hide his face; Raijin would get him a hood, and a cap, and some sunglasses or something, to keep him unrecognizable. He wouldn't ask questions of people: his friends would do that for him. It was a mark of how changed he was that he just nodded coolly and accepted this, his mind on his personal quest.

"Some of 'em wouldn't want to talk to me at this point anyway," he said to himself, shaking his head and staring at a point on the opposite wall, where there was nothing in particular.

Seifer, of course, knew exactly where they were going. He usually did, when he embarked on a self-appointed quest. His goal might be distant, foolhardy, or even unreachable. But he always had a plan for getting there, and this time the plan involved Cid's network.

Cid had always indulged Seifer's sorceress and knight obsession. Always pointed him to where he might uncover more. There were plenty of out of the way places that dealt in ancient history. These included a dingy, dark bookstore in Deling City, frequented only by elderly people slowly going dim, or else by the slightly shady. The abandoned headquarters of an old publishing house in Dollet, now used only to publish radical underground tracts by a group that seemed to oppose whatever the current power structure was. The shell of an ancient Timber religious college, a building with no roof, pockmarked with bullets, where dissidents still gathered for a kind of night market, selling old junk and trading information. Here and elsewhere, Seifer had gathered up the stories that drove him, collected histories of the Knights, searched and searched for the knowledge he'd ultimately abandoned, manuscripts and histories left to rot away in his old Garden storage locker. Raijin mentioned these possessions, tentatively, when they approached the Deling City bookstore.

"I memorized 'em anyway," Seifer said, shrugging. "But the Gallery. Now, that's somethin' I never heard about before."

And, as the world rebuilt itself after Time Compression, as the rest of the Orphanage Gang settled into newfound and slightly uncomfortable fame, as Seifer himself faded from the papers and new advertisements papered over the wanted posters with his face on them, he and his posse set out to learn more. That was what they'd been doing, all these months. While Zell had settled back into Balamb, Quistis settled back into teaching, Irvine and Selphie settled into SeeD life, and Rinoa and Squall settled (rather uncomfortably) into the roles of Commander and Sorceress, Seifer settled back into the newest iteration of his dream.

But he had few concrete breakthroughs.

"Years ago, years and years ago, there was a Gallery at Deling City University," said the wizened old man at the bookstore, after Raijin had plied him with some gil and plenty of drink. "A picture Gallery, you know. That was where the plaques would go up as well, for the students who'd accomplished great things, and next to each plaque there would be a photograph. It was a grand room. The Delings would present awards there. The Delings were a greater, grander family in those days."

"Were they," was all Seifer said, when Raijin brought him this information. He frowned, and demanded that they ask about the University to be next, just to be sure. But when Fujin and Raijin brought him a mountain of books on the topic, he took them apart and cut them up and preserved only the bits about dead languages, archeology, ancient history. A more modern portrait gallery was not, it seemed, what he was looking for.

Next came the publishing house.

"Down? Down?" the young woman there told Fujin, after weeks of Fujin ingratiating herself into the publishing house's rather closed social circle. "The idea of there being anything underground... That's nothing but old stories. They said once that the Knights and sorceresses could open pipelines to hell itself. I guess this last one had an attack that was like that, didn't he? The Deling City lapdog, not this mute Garden stooge with too much power to be good for him.

"That's what'll lead us all to hell. Their power. Leonhart's. All of theirs. They always snatch power in the end. So it's a metaphor. For what they do to the world, the Knights."

Seifer laughed a little, when Fujin told him this. Raijin felt relieved to see it; it was a little like the old Seifer was shining through the new one. Hello again, finally, to the derisive, teenage, but wonderfully familiar old Seifer. But the laugh packed up and fled Seifer's face as soon as it had come. He sobered and said, "I did know that. That we're supposed to be able to open up the earth. I forgot it - fucking Cid, with his GFs. And I used to think it was a metaphor too; that's why I designed bloodfest around it. Seemed like an inside joke, like something only somebody who knew about Knights would get. But..."

Raijin stared at him uneasily.

"What if I could do it?" Seifer said, breaking into a smile. It wasn't his old haughty smile, or the calculated, goading smile he used on people he didn't like, or even the reserved, private smile he'd had when they'd first met, the one he'd shown less and less over the years. It was a smile with a kind of unthinking bite to it. It was, Raijin thought wildly, a wild dog smile.

"Start asking about it," Seifer commanded. "It's real: the pipeline to hell. It must be."

And so they did. On and on. In basements in Winhill, in hidden nightclubs in Dollet, in strange Timber back alleys.

The night market was last. It had an erratic schedule, and Fujin and Raijin had to resort to using all their old contacts in Timber to find out when it would next be held. This was no easy task: they'd alienated plenty of these people when Timber had discovered that Seifer had delivered Rinoa Heartilly to Adel. But eventually they hit on the right information. They went together - it wasn't wise to visit the night market alone - and asked after the Gallery, after the Knights, after this _down _place, in every way they could.

It was nearly light out, and the market closing, when they got an answer. This came from a man who looked eerily familiar to Raijin somehow, though Raijin couldn't place how. He was large, dark, and looming. Older. Selling a strange assortment of remedies - not the usual stuff. Potions that would heal GFs and humans alike. Strange liquids that promised to bring on the desperation necessary to produce a limit break without stealing away any health in exchange. Something that looked like ordinary water, but that promised fantastic, realistic dreams of another life.

Fujin and Raijin lingered near his stall, pretending to browse, while they discussed in hushed voices the best way to bring up a notion as half-baked as a pipeline to hell. But the man surprised them. He said, "You'll want to hear an old, old story then."

They stared at him, shocked.

He said, "Your friend wants to go down there, I'll bet. I'll bet he does. No, no need to look surprised. I know who you are. I keep up with the news. And I'd have to be blind, deaf, and dumb not to know of your role in the last war."

Fujin recovered first from this unpleasant reminder of their somewhat-fugitive status. She turned on the man and looked straight into his eyes.

"OPENING IT?" she asked. Raijin, next to her, shifted and wondered why she asked in this fashion. They'd only hear the comforting truth: that this was a crazy fiction, something out of a bedtime story. And then they'd take that truth home to Seifer and Seifer would throw it back at them, sure, in his wild state, that the fiction was truth and the truth itself fiction.

"You mean you want to know how to open the pipeline to Hell?" said the man. Something about his dark eyes became unreadable. He said, "Oh no. Oh no. I'll not teach the boy that. I'm not in the business of selling suicide."

"NOT REAL," Fujin protested.

"If it's not real, then why ask about it?" said the man. "Or I'll tell you why: the boy's witch-touched. He's been changed. They change, when a witch gets them, They go very wrong. But they don't exactly go crazy, you know. They start to see things, and these things look like madness to you or I, but it's not madness. It's visions. It's a thought, a memory, a dream dropped into your head that doesn't belong to you, that belongs to Hyne and his daughters and the earth. It's the image of their kingdom, and I tell you: all Knights go there eventually. All Knights belong there. In the jewel at the earth's core. The Netherworld itself, the shadow domain of the Nether Rippers."

Fujin and Raijin looked at him warily. Warily, Raijin took a step back, tugging lightly at his sister's sleeve. Fujin, who normally would have rounded on him for pulling at her, this time likewise took a step back. They took another step back in unison. Then another.

"OKAY. BYE," Fujin said hurriedly.

"I guess Seifer's not the only crazy person in the world, ya know?" Raijin muttered to her, under his breath.

"Hell is real," the man called after them. No one in the night market paid this any mind; it was the kind of place where people often shouted things like this. But it still made Raijin shudder to hear it: the man sounded so certain. And, worst of all, he didn't stop there.

"Hell is real! It always has been. It resides here with us. What your friend wants is more than hell. It's more than I would ever wish to give even him! It is a pipeline not to hell but to the hell of hells: the Netherworld, and why should he rush? He'll get there eventually, your friend! They all get there eventually! He belongs to you no longer! He belongs to Hyne now!"

"We'll just tell him we didn't find anything out, ya know?" Raijin said, as they hurried away. But in his heart he had a sinking feeling. He wondered - if they told Seifer of this conversation, would it disturb him? Or-or it would it just give him a perverse kind of strength?

If they told him there were people out there who believed in a place to match his visions, in a hidden kingdom tucked below the earth, in a hell of hells-

* * *

"Oooookay, I know we aren't supposed to interrupt, but I don't understand," Selphie said slowly, a little bravely, in the present. She shot a look at Rinoa, and when Rinoa didn't snap at her she pressed on. "I'm sorry. So he wanted to go to _hell_?"

Hell wasn't supposed to be nice. It made little sense to want to go there. Or. Maybe it made a weird kind of sense because Seifer deserved to go there anyway for all they knew; he had, technically, the blood of the Trabians on his hands, not to mention Balamb Garden blood, and the blood of some Estharians to boot.

Mind, they all had blood on their hands. In fairness, Selphie had to admit this. But then she cheerfully demolished fairness in favor of practicality: this was the guy who'd supported the woman who sent missiles at her Garden. This was the guy who'd tossed her best friend at Adel. This was the guy who, in short, owed her a whole bunch before he was going to get any forgiveness out of her.

She eyed the choker Rinoa was wearing with a kind of satisfactory, self-righteous rage.

After a million years on the Garden Festival Committee, then he'd make it up. Maybe. Only then. The part of her that cherished the orphanage, that wanted to get along with everyone - that part admitted that he might still have a chance to be useful, appreciated, worthwhile, though probably never a friend. But the SeeD in her said that this was a slim chance indeed.

Though, strangely enough, their group didn't seem to be united in thinking this way. Rinoa, to go by her earlier story, did feel fury towards Seifer. But even she seemed to allow that there was something else there too; she had, after all, rescued Seifer from her old schoolmate without even thinking about it, and even made it a strange act of vengeance, presuming Seifer to be dead. Zell, to go by his story, seemed grimly resigned to the idea that Seifer had some good qualities, if only good qualities that only came out around Fujin and Raijin, and if only good qualities that were vastly outweighed by the bad ones.

But Irvine - Irvine was being weird. Earlier, he'd made sure to mention that Matron had missed Seifer, had apparently wanted them to go looking for him. And now he said, tiredly but also with some determination in his voice, "We've gotta try and see it from his perspective. Sounds like it's not hell, exactly. Sounds like it's-it's one of those old underground cities he was looking for."

"Right," Selphie said slowly. "Hell."

Irvine blinked at her. So, for that matter, did Rinoa and Zell. Behind her, someone cleared their throat, and Selphie turned to see Quistis standing at the entrance to Squall's room - she had evidently joined them sometime after Zell had. She said, "Selphie, that's just a story. Don't you see? Fujin and Raijin were right. He must have gone crazy."

The others nodded their agreement.

"Superstitions," Quistis continued smartly. "Fables, old wives' tales. Seifer was always weird about things like that, or I guess he must've been, if he had this dream to be a Knight his whole life-"

"And he did," Zell reported, sounding none-too-impressed by it.

"-but all that stuff - the Nether Rippers, the Duchy of Lost Children - those are legends with no basis in reality," Quistis finished.

"Pipe dreams," Irvine agreed. "People've been searching for years. The Delings wanted to find the Duchy once, I think-"

"All crazy people've wanted to find it," Zell put in. "There was this religious group in Balamb before the war, Ma said, that thought you could get there through the fire cavern, and that the fire pits in there would someday rise up and swallow the whole island. 'Cause it's where they thought Hyne was planning to take people, right? When he finally Ascended, he was gonna take us all back down to-

"The beginning of things!" Selphie insisted. She wasn't religious or anything, but. Well. She didn't exactly disbelieve the old stories, either. She was from Trabia; in Trabia, you respected Hell. You respected the thought of the earth opening up, the thought of the world caving in, the thought of all humanity melting into earth and lava and one-ness...

Heck, you respected it because in Trabia it really seemed like it might happen. It was wild country, snow country, where the sky in winter was painted with strange light, where the mountains had a million hidden caves. You had to accept the old stories of Hyne and the earth in Trabia. It seemed silly not to; the land itself there was a living thing.

But Quistis only came forward to sit with them, shaking her head. "Selphie," she said, not unkindly. "That's not real. Humanity didn't begin as dirt or magma from the earth, not anymore than magic comes from the moon and the snow is brought by fairies and-"

"Well, she does actually think the snow is brought by fairies," Zell muttered.

"Can you prove it isn't?" Selphie demanded hotly.

He gave her a superior kind of look. Zell, of all people. Selphie felt herself flush with anger at it. She said, "Well, alright, if you're so smart-"

"They're just tryin' to say that there's no proof for this stuff," Irvine said quietly.

Selphie stared at him. He had the good grace to look ashamed for siding against her. But then of course he'd sided against her; he was from Deling City. They probably didn't keep up with this stuff there; they certainly didn't in Balamb; fire cavern cults or not, the people here thought they were too smart for it all, too old for it, that these were all just stories for babies.

But Selphie knew, in her heart of hearts, that people didn't come up with stories for no reason. Even if you couldn't really find a pipeline to Hell, even if Hyne was long dead, even if there were no skulking Nether Rippers or Lost Children to be found, so what? Someone, somewhere, had put those stories together. As a warning. Stories that were warnings were worth paying attention to: they told you where the monsters were in life, where the fight would be.

They were a guide.

But no one else seemed to agree with her. Quistis was very firm about how Seifer had obviously cracked, and had probably had it coming. Zell seemed to feel that it was ludicrous for anyone to believe in something like the Nether Rippers and the Netherworld in this day and age, because anything below the earth would of course have a more rational explanation. Irvine was torn between placating Selphie, it seemed, and grudgingly admitting that it was somewhat childish to hold onto what were essentially a bunch of half-baked fairy tales.

Only Rinoa kept strangely silent. As a Deling City girl herself, and no doubt a highly educated girl, not a girl from some hick one-chocobo outpost like Trabia, she should have protested alongside the others. But she only bit her lip and looked increasingly annoyed about something, as though Seifer were vociferously arguing inside her head. Which, Selphie realized, he probably was.

"Say he did stumble on something. It wouldn't be hell. It would be buried cities, that's all," Irvine was saying. "Old civilizations. Deling City had all these excavations once, looking for these-"

Zell blinked at him, stunned. "Exactly!" he said. "It turned out to be just that. That weird old dig site-"

"The Centra ruins," Rinoa said, her voice very even, like she was repeating back information she'd been given. "It was the Centra ruins he was looking for the the whole time."

Zell stared at her. Selphie remembered that he had no idea she was somehow junctioning Seifer, and neither did Quistis, probably, and Selphie scowled to think of it. Even though she was mad at them both, that struck her as unfair, that they should be out of the loop. She determined that she wanted to goad Seifer into revealing himself, so she said chirpily, "Took him a long time to hit on something that was there all along, didn't it? He had to bully his friends, like a total jerk, into going to some weird midnight shopping mall, and just to-"

"It wasn't the night market that gave him the idea," Zell cut in, still looking a little warily at Rinoa. "It was Edea."

* * *

A/N: I know some readers want to see the return of Squall's POV, and you will! But the nature of a longfic like this is that I need to set up some other stuff first in order for parts of his POV to make sense. There are a few things that need to happen before Squall's experiences will work at all for any reader.

He is experiencing things, btw. I just can't tell you what he's experiencing yet.


	17. Chapter 17

It was always Edea, with Seifer. Wasn't it? Not that Zell wanted to blame Matron, exactly. The first thing Zell had felt - the first thing all of them had felt toward Matron - had been a rush of love, instant forgiveness, bittersweet acceptance. They'd all realized they would have to fight her, and they'd all felt bad about it, but they'd all done it anyway, and gratefully received her when it turned out she hadn't been their enemy at all, that it had been Ultimecia the whole time.

When he thought about it now, their reaction to her seemed oddly calm. They'd chosen to fight her with little agony over the decision. They'd chosen to accept her the same way, taking on a powerful affection for her that they'd never even known they'd once lost.

That was weird.

But it didn't matter, in the end. The months after the war had cooled Zell's adoration. It wasn't anything in particular that had done it; it was just the strange feeling of heading up to the third floor office to find her sitting there sometimes, waiting for Cid, a piece of the past transplanted into the present, and discovering that he had nothing to say to her. He didn't want to tell her about his life; it was like telling a stranger. He didn't want to talk about hers, because what could she say that would make over a decade of non-communication alright? He found that mostly he wanted to ask her a few specific questions: did you know about the GFs? Did you know we'd lose our memories? When I came to Garden, did Cid tell you? Did you plan to recruit me? Did you care, or was it just Squall and Ellone you kept tabs on?

If it had been me, and my birth family were living, would you have kept me from them?

If I'd been your hero of the future, would you have let me find a new family?

He'd never wondered if Seifer thought these same things. He never connected himself to Seifer in any way, so why would he have wondered something like that? But now, for the first time, as he recounted Edea's gift to Seifer, he thought he saw a glimmer of something linking them, this same unease towards their former Matron.

He shoved this link aside, and told the story.

Edea had sent Seifer a birthday gift. She hadn't done this with anyone else that Zell knew of; his birthday had just passed, and he'd received nothing, and neither had Irvine and Quistis. But that made sense: birthdays were an antiquated tradition, a tradition dating back only to the orphanage. In Balamb and on the Galbadia continent, they celebrated name days. And on the Estharian side of the world everyone celebrated the year they were born, not the day, turning older all at once, all together, on the first of the year. So birthdays were a Centran thing, and few people remained in Centra to celebrate them. Seifer had antagonized all the rest of the world, so maybe Matron had decided that he was, if only in a de facto way, again a child of Centra.

Seifer took one look at her gift and tossed it in a corner, a snarl on his face.

But, not long after, he circled around to it and picked it up, and when Fujin and Raijin returned to their hotel from the night market he was sitting in a cloud of black tissue paper and purple ribbon, reading the book and making notes on a separate piece of paper. Calm. Very deliberate. Silent. They eyed him warily. Their encounter with the man at the night market had been perplexing, but ultimately fruitless. They still had little they wanted to tell Seifer.

They didn't need to tell him anything. He'd found his own solution.

"It's the Ruins," Seifer said calmly. "In Centra. The Northern Islands. I don't need to use the Ruins; supposedly I can get there on my own. I'd rather do it on my own. Open a path there, the way only a Knight can. But She never bothered to teach me how."

No one needed to ask who She was.

"So," Seifer continued, "We'll use the open pipeline. We'll go where he rests - Wardegrave, I mean. And we'll use the path his sorceress opened."

He said this very placidly. He'd hit on a next step somehow, through something he'd found in Edea's book, and he seemed to think the next step was a good one, and this made him seem eerily tranquil, very unlike himself. It took Raijin a second to figure out why he seemed so strange. Then it hit him: Seifer was satisfied.

The last time Seifer had been satisfied, the only time he'd ever seen Seifer satisfied, Seifer had been serving a woman who wanted to compress time and so effectively halt all existence itself.

Raijin winced without even realizing he was doing it.

But Seifer didn't notice the wince. He said, "That's how you get _down_. That's where there'll be a path. And," he added, with no small amount of gratification, "It's the resting place of the greatest Knight. So we go there, and we'll find a way."

Fujin and Raijin looked at him uneasily.

Seifer always had a plan, but he was not one for especially careful and meticulous planning and never had been. That was fine. They'd never held it against him. But now Raijin felt it necessary to point out that the Centra Ruins were miles away, inaccessible by train, located in unforgiving terrain, populated - it was said - by hordes of Tonberries, poisoned a pall of magic so toxic it was said to be nearly radioactive, very far from any reliable food source-

"CREEPY," Fujin put in, and Raijin thought this was a very good point, so he continued, "Yeah, and they're supposed to be really creepy, ya know? And this-Seifer. This is crazy! You've lost your head, ya know? You're gonna head to this death trap, this place nobody ever goes anymore 'cause the people who do keep disappearin', and you won't find anything! A bunch of old ruined buildings, ya know? Skeletons in the ground and stuff -"

"DIRT," Fujin added pointedly. It was somewhat amazing to Raijin that she wasn't furious with him for pointing out the bare truth to Seifer. Before, she might have been. She was, like Seifer, a fighter to the core, and so they'd always had a weird understanding. Seifer calmly received her strangeness, her moments of fury, the odd and uncomfortable times she dropped her speech patterns and slipped into piercing and plainly-spoken insight instead. And she understood that he wasn't by nature solicitous, that he wasn't cautious, that he would do just about anything to be great, grand, in control, noble by his own standards.

Raijin loved them both, and suspected they loved him, or at least liked him well enough. But they went one further: up until the war, they'd always accepted each other. And, being both arrogant people in their own ways, they'd worn that acceptance proudly. Seifer would brook no cruel comments about Fujin, and Fujin would brook no disrespect - however honest - directed at Seifer.

But now she didn't say anything. She loved Seifer in her own way; Raijin knew this. But now it wasn't such a comfortable love, now she seemed ill at ease and, having spent years accepting Seifer, it was like she needed extra time to be able to phrase and express the things she couldn't accept about him.

When she'd told Raijin she thought they would have to leave him behind, leave him to his sorceress, the words hadn't come easy to her at all.

"This is crazy," Raijin begged. And what he meant was: _we didn't want to leave you. Don't make us leave you again._ But he found, horribly, that those words didn't come so easily to him. He was alright with words, good at being genial, good at checking in with people, good at making sure they knew he'd listen to them. But he didn't want to listen to Seifer. He wanted Seifer to listen to him, and that was a goal that was likely to go unfulfilled.

Seifer had used the time during Raijin's diatribe to take the book back up and scribble something on it, then begin wrapping it up carefully in its black and purple paper. Why, Raijin had no idea. When Seifer finished, he looked up at them and there was something hard in his gaze, like he wasn't looking at them at all, like instead of seeing them he was seeing only hectoring instructors, chastising SeeDs and Shumi Guardians, whining underclassmen, _Cid_. Like he'd stopped classifying them as his posse, and they were now just another part of the interfering world.

It hurt a little, that look.

"If you don't want to come," Seifer told them flatly. "Then don't. Won't be the first time we parted ways."

And that, horribly enough, hurt a lot. Raijin felt numb to hear it, like Seifer was blaming them for leaving him during the sorceress war. But what were they supposed to have done? Even Seifer had to admit that he'd been in the wrong, right? And Seifer had never brought this up like this before, never made an issue of it. He'd seemed to have accepted it easily, never held it against them - and how could he?

"Seifer," Fujin said, very quietly, "The last time we parted ways, how did that work out for you?"

Seifer's eyes flashed to her. He looked momentarily enraged, wild again, powerful and furious and somehow not human. Fujin held his gaze.

"Seifer," she said again, "We'll go with you. But if we do, there will be rules."

* * *

This had been, Fujin reflected later, in the present, one of the biggest pronouncements she'd ever made in her life. It had almost shocked her to say it - it always shocked her to impose rules on Seifer. It wasn't that she thought he was too good for them, or that she was a born follower, or that she worshiped the ground he walked on, or whatever it was that people at B-Garden had liked to say about her. It was that she, herself, didn't put much faith in rules, regulations, codes, and creeds. She'd grown up under one: a creed of peace. And all it meant was creeping, fearful anxiety, a sense of powerlessness, the pain of seeing any visitor with a gun or a GF muscle their way around her hometown.

No. Not for her. And if it wasn't for Seifer either, then she could understand that. Usually. Maybe.

But what did you do when a friend lost their mind?

No; that wasn't it. He hadn't lost his mind at all. That was the surprising thing - that was the worst thing about the whole mess. She almost wished he had, almost wished he'd remained that lost, wild-seeming creature she and Raijin had salvaged and taken back to FH. She could have lived with that Seifer, deranged though he was, could have handled the pitying looks tossed their way by Flo, the pompous smugness directed at them by their father.

She could even have handled running around the world with Seifer, dragging him from place to place, led only by his whims and his dream. The vagabond lifestyle had almost suited the DC. They'd always been particularly stubborn, good at getting what they wanted - hadn't she and Raijin muscled their way into the Galbadian army expressly to find Seifer? Not so hard, then, to muscle their way into hidden stores and markets, to trade information for scraps of old stories, even to head to the dock in the dead of night and untie the Master Fisherman's boat, take it around to the rear of town, cast off in the dark, and head south, south, south.

To Centra.

She'd never been to Centra before. Seifer had apparently lived there as a child; he let this information drop carelessly, freely, when they asked him what he'd done with Edea's gift. What had he done with it? Sent it back. He didn't want it. Who cared about her, anyway? Yes, she'd been his Matron. But she'd never given him anything of any value; no, more value had come from the monster moon shining above the shores, the rocky places where the water collected in strange green pools, the cliffs and the unforgiving forests of the sorceress continent, the Knights' continent. He'd forgotten for so long that this was his rightful place, this was the one place on the earth that could give him what he needed. This was his original home, after all. Close to the pathways to hell itself.

"You never said she raised you in Centra, ya know?" Raijin cut in, interrupting this great speech, this fantastic diatribe, delivered to the water in front of them and the water behind them and the moon, probably, because they were in the middle of the ocean and there was nothing else to receive it.

"STRANGE," Fujin said, before Seifer could ignore them and go on.

"Centra's not a place for kids," Raijin said. "Weird things happen there, ya know? Lunar cries, cactuar crop circles. Why keep a bunch of kids out there, in the middle of nowhere? No hospitals, no schools."

"NO PEOPLE," Fujin said.

"I heard most of the people who lived there during the Adel war sent their kids back to Galbadia and Esthar when the fighting started, ya know?" said Raijin. "And the kids that stayed got taken to Esthar, mostly, when Adel's men found them. Lots of orphans, but not many left to stay in Centra, ya know?"

Seifer regarded them with some distaste, like they were a pair of dead beetles he'd found in the bottom of a drinking glass. Then he turned away and laughed about something to himself, and looked at the moon, and fell silent. He was silent all the way to Centra, and it seemed to spread a layer of silence over the other two, a blanket of condemning silence. Fujin couldn't figure out what to say to fix things, anyway, or what they were supposed to talk about. Anyway, if she did something, then Raijin might say, again, as an aside to her, for the hundredth time, that they needed to get Seifer some kind of therapist or something. And she would say, again, as an aside to him, for the hundredth time, that there was no therapist in the world who would take Seifer without reporting him to the authorities. Seifer had nowhere to go.

Which didn't keep him from heading to one of the worst possible places anyway. Fujin had imposed rules (no leaving them behind, no wandering off if he thought he saw a sign of Wardegrave's burial mound; no stopping to talk to himself) because it seemed to her that they were likely to have a hard time of it in the Centra Ruins, rumored to be full of dangerous Tonberries. They were likely to end up dragging Seifer back home with a chef's knife in his gut, weakened but none the wiser.

Nothing about the Ruins, when they reached them, contradicted these assumptions. If the silence in the boat had been troubling, a foreboding thing that suggested coming danger, then the silence in the Ruins seemed almost likely to wound them outright. It was a living silence, a powerful absence of sound that seemed to have taken form and smothered the whole area, wrapped itself around the fallen columns, the withered statues, the horrible stairs that assembled out of empty air.

Seifer laughed again when he saw these signs of magic. Crackles of light appeared out of nowhere as the group made its way further into the old Tower. Platforms rose into the air without provocation, steps slotted out of the stone, as though an invisible force were guiding their movement, plotting out exactly how it wanted to take them, and where. Stone birds and beasts gazed at them sightlessly, their weathered black surfaces taking on a strange gleam at times, though there was little sunlight to reflect inside the tower. When they stepped out onto its open air platforms, here and there Fujin thought she caught sight of yellow eyes and scaly green flesh, as though the creatures here followed them with near-human intelligence, and were waiting to trap them somewhere. She and Raijin fell into step the way they were used to, weapons out and at the ready, backs tilted toward each other so that they could cover the greatest area with their eyes, so that they could spot a threat coming from any direction.

But Seifer coolly raised an eyebrow at this and sheathed his gunblade, dedicated himself to climbing the tower, following the path set out by the invisible force.

"I thought we were headin' down, ya know?" Raijin muttered, when they'd turned a corner and found a wall folding in on itself, revealing to them a hidden room with eerie-looking sigils set inside. Blocky men in a great parade. A chocobo with its insides cut open. A woman with six arms, and a severed head in each arm.

Seifer didn't seem to hear him. He surveyed the room. He said, "Not this one," even though they were at the top of the shimmering, newly-appeared, floating steps, and had nowhere else to go. He put a foot confidently upwards, where there was only the thin air, and for one horrible moment Fujin thought he would topple off the floating steps and plummet to the bottom of the tower, he would crash into the statue of the sorceress and knight at the bottom, he would be nothing more than a bloody blur on the Centran ground below them.

But solid brick appeared underneath his foot. He continued climbing up, and as he went up, so too did the steps keep appearing. The steps went on and on. Seifer just had to sacrifice all common sense to get them to appear.

"Wardegrave died here," Seifer commented, "And his spirit protects the place. Protects the entrance to hell, to keep hell out of the world and man out of hell."

"WOMAN TOO," Fujin commented, almost without thinking about it, because 1. she wanted nothing more than to be kept out of hell right now, and for that matter out of the Centra Ruins, and 2. something about the sheer inappropriate casualness of Seifer right now made her tetchy. He didn't seem scared, and that was normal for him. But he didn't seem to be anything in particular. Over the past few months he'd become rail-thin, unkempt, inscrutable, and somehow untouchable: a being set apart from all humanity by the strange goal he'd fixated on.

_Witch-touched_, she thought, thinking of the man in the night market.

And her witch-touched friend seemed to know just where he was going, or at least where he wasn't. Several times they hit on hidden rooms, strange turnings, and he would step back, shake his head, say, "No, not here," and keep climbing. Up. Up. Up. Until they found a great dome at the top of the tower, and set into the dome a horrible statue, a monster with two gaping holes for eyes.

Seifer traced the faded inscription carved into the leg of the statue. It wasn't in Standard. It was - Fujin realized - in Ancient Centran. She hadn't used the language in months, not since her last class with Instructor Figeroa at Garden, and she found now that it took her a few minutes to decipher.

WARE THE NETHER RIPPERS, the statue said.

It unsettled Fujin. It shouldn't have; it was so ridiculous. 'Ware the Nether Rippers.' Why warn against a children's story? Better to have said, 'Ware Pupurun,' or something equally stupid.

"Is that a Nether Ripper?" Raijin asked quietly, staring up at the statue. He was tall enough to be closest to its gaping eyes, and he looked at them once, then turned away so quickly he almost fell off of the platform at the top of the dome.

"Don't be stupid. Nether Rippers can see," Seifer said easily, and climbed down to the edge of the dome, followed it around to the other side of the tower, like this wasn't what they were looking for either. When he'd climbed down a ways he found another statue and this one had red jewels set into its sockets, and underneath it was the entrance to a low, dark corridor. Seifer clambered onto its ledge and pocketed the jewels, then swung down into the corridor. Swallowing hard, Fujin followed him and trusted Raijin to bring up the rear.

The room was empty. It was a circular room with strange cables snaking along the floors, high church windows, and niches set into the walls. It seemed to belong to some other building, almost, or maybe many other buildings. Nothing in it was dirty or weathered like the rest of the Ruins. Even the carpet beneath their feet was perfectly clean, though Fujin discovered, to her alarm, that someone had dropped a small piece of paper nearby, and when she lifted it up she could hardly believe what it said.

BALAMB GARDEN

LOCATION: CAFETERIA

TRANSACTION #: 54921108

TRANSACTION:

4 HOT DOGS...30G

1 FOUNTAIN DRINK...5 G

TOTAL...35G

THANK YOU FOR YOUR BUSINESS!

EAT WELL AND STUDY HARD!

She stared at it, disbelieving.

"Seifer?" she called. Somehow this was creepier than the monster statues, the invisible-visible steps, the lurking Tonberries, the mention of Nether Rippers. You expected all that with the Centra Ruins. You didn't expect something as ordinary as a crumpled Garden receipt.

Seifer wasn't listening to her. He was examining the dais in the center of the room, tracing along its edge and then glancing up at the great lamp hanging from the ceiling, as though he were almost disappointed. Fujin showed the receipt to Raijin instead.

"SeeD was here, ya know?" Raijin muttered. "When? Why?"

Seifer turned then, finally hearing them, and fixed them with a sharp look.

"I'll bet they were here. They were here and they took something," he bit out, and unsheathed his gunblade in frustration, and swung it - wildly, furiously - at the floor. After a minute he buried its tip there easily in the stone, knowing that this wouldn't damage the indestructible metal Cid had gifted him, and then stood on the dais, glowering. Evidently he'd expected to find something here, but there was nothing to find. Whoever the 4 Hot Dog SeeD was, they'd taken it.

They stared at each other in silence. After a minute, Raijin said, "Well, that's that, ya know? Time to go home, ya know? Nothing to see here."

Not that they'd expected there to be.

"SHOULD GO," Fujin chimed in hurriedly.

"Yeah. There's Tonberries, ya know? And SeeD might still be around. You don't know whether they're lookin' for you, Seifer. Or if they wanna arrest you, ya know? What if Squall put out a hit on you?"

"OR XU," Fujin said.

"Hell, even Instructor Trepe might attack on sight, ya know?" Raijin said. He'd turned now and started out of the room. Fujin stepped after him, still looking back at Seifer, willing Seifer to follow. Raijin checked out the exit corridor, scoping it out for Tonberries. He said, low, "We've gotta get him to a doctor, ya know? We should've done it months ago."

And Seifer said, "You go," and crouched down again to examine the dais again, scowling.

Fujin looked at Raijin. Raijin looked at Fujin. They had, long ago, tossed around a certain plan when it came to Seifer. A plan that had seemed ridiculous, cruel, an unforgivable breach of trust. And, generally speaking, they would have needed a GF to carry it out. Although-

"Sleep powder," Fujin whispered,

"I don't think it works that way, ya know?" Raijin said. "Throw it on an enemy in battle and what happens? Nothing, It's powder."

Fujin scowled at him. She'd thought they were more inventive than that - the two of them. And it wasn't like they hadn't taken classes on this topic at Garden: transmutability. A core part of the curriculum. One of Lados Odine's seventeen key magical principles. Suppose one had enough of a spell? Well, it could be transmuted into a higher spell. And any junk could be transmuted into elixirs or other items, and elixirs or items into spells. Any cards could be transmuted into junk, and then junk again to elixirs, and then-

Well. The point was clear. Things - sheer, distinct, with their own properties - could be molded, changed, altered, in the right hands. Until they became high magic, which was of course the natural consequence of all things, the ultimate state, the closest state to Hyne. Sleep powder was no use, yes. But it could be refined into sleep, and in fact that was its entire purpose.

"We need a GF, ya know?" Raijin said again.

But this, Fujin felt, was partly wrong. Yes, to obtain higher magic, you needed the ability to access base magic in the first place. That was how you effected the more complicated transmutations. Outlined in Basic Training Manual VII, Chapter 5, Article 14. But you didn't start with the complicated stuff, did you? First you took the junior classman curriculum, and that was simpler transmutation, that had to do with making solids into liquids, liquids into gases, and so on. Nothing difficult; nothing you couldn't do yourself. Observing the way all forms of being bled into each other, the connectedness of it all: heat up a potion, and suddenly you had healing vapors in the air. Dissolve a powder in water, and now you had something that looked like water, but could do-

Well. More than mere water could. Sometimes.

Fujin figured it was worth a shot, it was so simple. She took out her canteen. Her brother watched her, puzzled, as she tipped the sleep powder into it and shook it. No need to shake it, though. she reminded herself, stopping. Magical essences like these - they left no traces, once you changed their form. This was not like dissolving a hard non-magical substance, dirt or blood or something real.

It was, Fujin remembered Cid explaining to the younger students, more like working with hope, or starlight, or dreams.

Dreams were not concrete. They just existed, invisible, intangible, more powerful than anything.

She stared down at the clear liquid in her canteen. Brought it to Seifer.

"DRINK," she told him simply.

He looked up her, eyes somehow more green than usual in their sheer irritability.

"I'm not thirsty," he said, and continued pacing around the dais, stopping only to get on his knees, press the floor, mutter strange incantations he must have picked up from his months of mad late-night research. None were effective. No pathways to hell opened.

So he wouldn't drink it. Of course not. When had he ever done what other people wanted? Fujin looked at Raijin. Raijin shrugged, and looked defeated. But Fujin was not defeated.

She was angry.

It came very suddenly, and it surprised her. She was often angry, of course. But it didn't control her. She controlled it. Anger came very naturally to her; she could put it on and take it off at will, like a jacket. It was a useful thing, her anger, it was what gave her the strength to force her way when she needed to, what had made her powerful enough to turn her back on FH and turn her back on Garden and - eventually, pensively, because she'd seen that it had needed to be done - turn her back on Seifer.

With the hope that it would snap him back to reality. Which it hadn't. And she felt overpoweringly, frustratedly, horribly angry about that. Not rage, not her fast, brutal, efficient anger. But a toxic, infesting, smothering anger that made her, for a moment, lose her sense of what to do.

She hated not knowing what to do. She'd only ever felt it once before, and then, too, it had involved Seifer.

"Rage," she said, very quietly, to focus herself.

Seifer didn't seem to hear it. Just as well. Fujin took a breath and redirected her anger. Then she dumped the contents of the canteen over his head.

It was a horrible, drawn-out few seconds that followed. Raijin, still standing by the exit, opened his mouth, then closed it, then opened it again, gaping, looking horrified.

Seifer didn't move. He seemed frozen. He seemed - Fujin realized - not entirely sure what had just happened. To be fair, she wasn't entirely sure, either. She felt certain that she'd done the right thing, but then she usually did feel that way. She was rarely unhappy with her decisions. Neither she nor Seifer was really programmed that way, which, she now reflected distantly, might not be the best way to be.

Seifer stood up.

"Why," he said, in a voice full of level, pure, horrible fury, "Did you do that?"

Fujin was not a liar by nature, and so she felt she had to be honest. Honest and direct. Maybe she'd speak normally, though, just to let him know how serious she was.

"To put you to sleep. Did it work?"

He turned slowly. He didn't look asleep. He just looked very wet. She remembered, a half-second too late, which was far too late, that Cid's lessons had always leaned hard on _imbibing_ the transmutation. She wracked her brain to try and figure out if they'd ever learn what happened if you just dumped it on someone, if you just washed them in a pall of magic. And had they ever used sleep powder anyway? It had been-it had been really powerful stuff they'd transmuted in class. Ultima stones, Aura stones. Things like that.

Oh fuck.

Seifer made a sound like a growl, furious and unhinged. Behind him, Raijin was a series of aborted movements, unsure, panicky, as though he had no idea who to defend or what to do.

Seifer said, "Y-"

And that was as far as he got. His eyelids fluttered, and somehow Fujin could see the pale blue veins in the skin of them very clearly for a moment. Then they slid closed. Then he fell over.

She heard a soft, childlike gasp from him.

Sweet dreams.

Fujin stared down at him, a little worried, a little pleased, mostly shocked that it had worked. When she looked up again, Raijin had run up to the dais. He was running a hand through his hair, still looking charged up and panicky. He burst out with, "What did y- Fujin. Fujin! Why? What-_How_-why do that? What did you do? Why? What is-how?"

He couldn't seem to settle on the right question. She couldn't blame him; in her own way, she was just as shocked as he was.

"HAD TO BE DONE."

"He'll be angry, ya know?" Raijin continued, sounding breathless and terrified.

"NEEDED IT."

"He's never gonna forgive us, ya know?"

"TOO BAD," Fujin said ruthlessly.

Waving his arms with nervous energy, staring down at Seifer's sleeping form, Raijin said, "He'll see it as betraying him! He'll think it's the worst thing we've ever done, ya know?"

"KNOW. DON'T CARE."

"He'll yell, ya know?"

"I'LL LIVE."

"We should've done it weeks ago!"

Fujin stared at Raijin. Raijin stared back. She realized that this was very strange for them, this restructured dynamic. Usually Raijin was the one tentatively disagreeing with Seifer's plans, and Fujin was the one kicking him to make him fall in line. Only now they both disagreed, and there was no kicking. There was just this nervous, determined support from her brother. They were going to fix this. They were going to fix _Seifer_. She didn't know how, but she knew that they'd do it, and she knew that Raijin wouldn't question how she chose to do it.

Raijin was, she realized, a very good brother.

After a minute, as he realized that Seifer really was well and truly asleep, Raijin's nervous energy seemed to leave him. He straightened up. He grinned. Then he said, "Let's get Hyperion and go, ya know? Can't leave that behind."

Fujin nodded. This was a good plan. They needed a Seifer they could maneuver a little, not a Seifer deprived of the one possession that meant the most to him. Raijin strode to where Hyperion was embedded in the floor, not so far from where Seifer and Fujin were on the dais, and reached out one powerful arm to pull it out.

He overshot himself. He did this a lot. He was very large and he didn't know his own strength. He pulled Hyperion out so roughly and swiftly that he overbalanced, and fell towards them still holding it, and though Fujin dived out of the way just in time, the tip of the blade caught Seifer's fallen arm and scratched it.

Not deep. Nothing serious. Just enough to create a trickle of blood that slid down his pale skin and pooled on the marble underneath him. Just enough to make Raijin curse and scramble back to them, dropping Hyperion next to his sleeping friend and examining the scratch.

"STUPID!" Fujin told him, her momentary affection for him gone.

"I know, I know, ya know?" Raijin said. "I'm sorry! Let's just pick him up and go, ya know? You can yell when we're someplace less creepy!"

But as he reached out to cradle the back of Seifer's neck, the dais they were standing on shifted. Fujin stumbled, momentarily off-balance and then stared at Raijin, wondering for a moment if he'd felt it. He stared back. He had felt it. Then she heard a hissing sound, and when she looked at the floor all around the dais the cables were snaking out of the way, retreating into the walls, and the red-carpeted path to the exit was, improbably, horribly _sinking_. Fujin watched it, unable to comprehend. The floor itself was sliding back, following the path of the cables. The red path had already detached itself from the exit tunnel, and it rippled fluidly, but there was a horrible creaking metallic sound that accompanied it, like the sound of old machinery coming back to life. The air smelled suddenly damp, earthy, like they were outside. There were no exits from the dais but this red path, reassembling itself into crude steps, steps pointing down, down.

Down.

And the trickle of blood from Seifer's arm slowly traveled along the dais, as though it were not his blood at all, but simply a streak of wine-red watercolor, as though the invisible force that had led them here had procured a paintbrush, and was using Knight's blood, now, to mark the way.

The blood linked to the red steps at the far edge of the dais. Fujin felt her heart seize up, fearful, and leaned over the near end. They were now on a high platform in the center of the room, and all sides of the platform plunged downwards, a sheer cliff, a tunnel to the murky black below. They were so high, and the red steps leading out from the dais went down so far, winding around and around this central column they now stood on, that Fujin could not see the bottom.

She stared at Raijin. Raijin stared at her.

They had opened the pipeline to hell.

* * *

Now Fujin looked for a new pipeline, a new path. The Centra Ruins weren't the only pathway.

On the Trabia side of the Vienne range there were installed several battered green cars. These were made of metal salvaged from the transports the Trabians had used to escape Adel years ago. The cars swung and rattled on lines designed to take people up the mountains and then back down again, rolling along high above the snow. Rides cost two gil, unless one had the seventeen-gil season pass. The operator was an old Shumi, exiled from his tribe for reasons unknown, who never spoke, sometimes gave back more change than was necessary if he liked the look of a person, and sometimes forbade certain persons from riding at all.

Fujin he liked. Fujin he waved through.

She'd left Cid behind in Edea's hotel room. Hotel was a grandiose word. Trabia didn't have hotels. Trabia didn't even have a real town. Trabia was a scattered collection of snowy farmsteads and fisherman's cabins and woodsman's haunts. Trabia Garden had been the closest thing to civilization up here: small, but just as beautifully sleek and modern-seeming as its counterparts to the South and West, with a network of small shops and homes nearby that had been destroyed in the attack. Edea had been staying at a rebuilt rooming house and chocobo menagerie not too far from the site, which would have made her an easy target for the locals.

Only a local hadn't taken her. Hyperion's blade had made those marks on the wall of the rooming house, and Hyperion meant Seifer. Seifer wasn't local.

Fujin was glad for it, too. She suspected he would have had an entirely different character had he been raised in Trabia, and, all her previous anger aside, she liked his grandiose and closed-off and sometime-unpleasant character. It wasn't nice. But it was his. While the people here… They couldn't have been more different from Seifer if they'd tried. They were so aggressively humble that it almost seemed put-on. They seemed eager to show her that they didn't mind her too-big coat, or how she was loaded down with weapons and potions. She thought they had a kind of rustic local pride, this desire to appear countrified and open and kind. The Trabians didn't know about any sinkholes or hidden paths to the center of the world. No, no, that was above the humble Trabian paygrade. But they, each and every one, wished her the greatest luck in finding what she was searching for.

She supposed she should be grateful, but really she had little patience for this useless easy hospitality. No less than four scarred young men had offered to show her around the reconstructed Garden. One had offered to take her down to the cemetery. They apparently had beautiful wreaths up this season.

"NO THANKS," Fujin had said.

"Are you sure?" he'd asked. "That's what people do when they come up here, you know. Tour the cemetery, see where we housed the dead and dying—"

"GREAT VACATION SPOT," said Fujin.

"—or head up the Vienne. But you can't go up the mountains now, obviously."

"WHY," Fujin asked.

"Because of the eruption!" the Trabian boy had said. "Haven't you heard? There was a minor eruption. Turns out the mountain might be a volcano. Dr. Asede always said it was, but there was no proof until now. But now the top's exploded with black dust. You could see it for miles. No lava, though. I wonder if there will be lava later?"

He'd broken off, pensive. He hadn't seemed too perturbed by the thought of a volcanic eruption wiping out the rest of Trabia. Trabians in general seemed to be as hardy as they were open and friendly, perfectly resigned to the fact that one third of their population had been killed a little under a year ago. Whatever mourning they'd had to do, they'd already done. Now they focused on moving on. If a volcanic eruption hit, they would probably face that calmly, too.

They were really boring people. Fujin supposed she admired their strength, but she found herself missing her brother and best friend more than ever.

Seifer was still her friend. It didn't matter that she wasn't his, that she'd disloyally dumped sleep potion all over him, and that he counted no one as a friend, not really. As far as she was concerned, he'd always been counted a friend of hers. So she went back to the rooming house and commandeered a chocobo, and then headed up the mountainside, where she paid for her two-gil ticket. The green car jolted and creaked all the way up. It smelled faintly of menthol drops and Trabian acorn beer. It was a tawdry, slow way to travel. It didn't seem to be Seifer's style, not at all.

But then what was it she'd been told?

_It's not him anymore._

This could be true. Fujin had heard enough from other sources to corroborate it. It could be the Seifer she knew. Or it could be someone else entirely.

He was, regrettably, witch-touched.

Her car had creaked loudly to a stop at the top of the mountain. Fujin pushed open the door and jumped down into the snow below. From here, she could see down to all the vast reaches of Trabia – the odd homestead here and there, the ruins of Trabia Garden out past the forests, tucked into another set of mountains, and from there all the way out to grey shores and the icy blue sea. She was so high up that she was nearly level with the clouds, she thought. The winds up here were strong, and they pushed facefuls of telltale black dust her way. The dust was everywhere. It mingled with the snow and made the whole place look dirty, muddy. Fujin lifted the collar of Seifer's coat to cover her mouth and nose, so as not to breathe it all in, and began the winding path further up the mountain, trekking through the snow and dust all the way. She passed an abandoned souvenir cabin, rooted through it for extra potions and remedies, then continued. It was twenty minutes before she saw another one. This one was closer to the mouth of the mountain, and was covered in more black dust, its roof caved through by rocks as though an avalanche had come down. The path beyond was even rockier and harder to pick through, but after another ten minutes she had cleared it. She stood looking down at the brand new hole in the center of the Vienne.

It wasn't as obvious as the entrance in the Egabi, or the one in the Centra ruins. There were no stairs to show it led anywhere. There was nothing she could detect at first. The rough black walls of the crater simply led down, down, and vanished into darkness, as though the mountain really had been scooped out by a small volcanic eruption. But after a moment, her eyes straining through the wind and snow and dust everywhere, she saw it. A small ladder on the other side. A railing. A kind of platform. And, though she could barely make it out in the darkness of the crater, thin cables of some dark-hued metal.

Once, long ago, she thought wildly, the entryways to the Netherworld must have been used very regularly. It was a whole world down there, and whole world up here, and there were these connecting points, these places that kept the surface tethered to the hells. Why had they been built? Surely to shuttle goods, technology, magic to and from the surface. Maybe to shuttle people. Why else?

And what did one use to get down a mountain? Cable cars. Obviously.

She considered how to reach the other side of the crater. But before she could implement any plan, the earth below her shuddered.

The hole was closing. Fujin cursed. She turned on her heel and picked her way hurriedly through the rocks, slipping a few times. By the time she reached the collapsed cabin, small rocks and bits of debris were shaking and rolling down along her heels. By the time she reached the first cabin the she was dodging boulders that would have broken her leg. And when she made it back to the green cable car, she narrowly missed being flattened by a huge wave of snowy earth that swung the car unsteadily, pitching it forward and throwing Fujin against the seat with some force. She pushed furiously at the button to call down to the Shumi below, fearing that if he didn't get her down in time the next avalanche would snap the lines. But by some miracle it didn't. The car was hit a few more times, everything shrieked ominously, but she made it back down in one piece.

The hole atop the Vienne had closed.

So Fujin went to find Cid. Just because the portal was closed didn't mean it couldn't be reopened. They could always be reopened. They were keyed to respond to magic. To Sorceresses. And to Knights. Cid was technically not a Knight anymore. But was Seifer. And yet Seifer's blood had done the trick, and so, she was sure, would Cid's.

Once you were witch-touched, could you stop being witch-touched?

Probably not. Edea wasn't a sorceress anymore, after all, and they'd still taken her to hell.

_But why now?_ Fujin thought shakily, as she made her way back to the rooming house in the snow. _Why would they come up now? Why take Edea? And why is Seifer working with them?_

She thought she knew the answer.

They never should have gone down there.


	18. Chapter 18

The train still carried Seifer, Renata, and - though no one knew it - Squall.

It creaked its way down endless tunnels. At points it emerged onto rails bordered by sidewalks hung with curving lanterns and banked by curious shops, shops with green glass windows and gemstone displays, whirring by so quickly that Seifer's eyes could barely make out the names and signs in time to translate: Clairvoyance Emporium, Bargain Monster Attraction at Low Prices, Elemental Protection Or Your Money Back. There was a battered map on the wall of the train, a network of faded colorful lines, called Phipps' Arteries, and then beneath these words in curlicue script:

Netherworld Public Transit.

Squall felt a strange jolt at these words. It was a jolt of nervousness, from him. And it was a jolt of strange, savage joy, from Seifer. It was hard to tell, though; he and Seifer were so connected now that they nearly seemed to feel the same things, at times, and their emotions were so tangled together that even Squall had trouble tracing them back to the true source.

For his part, Seifer read the stop names instead of listening fully to Renata. In his mind, the trick was losing Renata. Renata wasn't a bad person. She clearly wanted to help him. But he didn't need helping. And Squall, listening in to Seifer's not listening, felt a prickle of secondhand shame at this thought. He remembered well the days of not wanting anyone else's help. And it struck him now how very stupid that had been. Seifer was in—

The…Netherworld? Some _netherworld_. The kind of name they gave to places you didn't want to end up in, if Squall had ever heard a name like that. A name like, oh, you know, "D-district prison." A name with a bad ring.

And yet Seifer wasn't interested in leaving, in accepting Renata's aid. Offers of assistance chafed at Seifer very deeply, and it wasn't anything as simple as arrogance or pride. Seifer had grown up determined to construct his own identity, to make himself. If he didn't do it, no one would. He had no parents, no connection to any known souls save Cid and Squall, and Squall had stalked off to be by himself, while Cid had handed them both strange forces that sapped away memory and so sapped away identity. So the only person to ever define Seifer, to tell him where came from and who he was and who he could be, was Seifer. He'd dreamed himself up, invented his own life. Daring. Strong. Fearless.

People helping him felt like people trying to define him. Mold him.

Cid's halfhearted kindness, always coming on the heels of tossing Seifer to the Shumi guardians as an example of Poor Behavior, was regarded with suspicion. Instructor Trepe, with her writeups about his recklessness and cruelty, was thoroughly ignored. Xu's mean little pronouncements he raged over, but told himself meant nothing. Even Dincht's petulant whines that Seifer cared for no one except himself – this kind of crybaby crap was tossed away. Seifer let no one make up his identity for him; his greatest fear had always been to have his life constructed by other people.

_Then of course Ultimecia came along and did that to you anyway_, thought Squall.

And, oddly, Seifer thought the same. In his mind he now associated all attempts to direct him, to channel him to safety, even, with Ultimecia, And with Cid. And with all those figures in his life who'd been more powerful than he was, and who'd wrenched control away from him, at the expense of his own identity.

And the fear grew inside him as Renata discussed smuggling him out, listed strange code names, told him that she believed he didn't know where he was, didn't know the dangers here. The fear grew, bigger and bigger and bigger, crested, and then—

Seifer shoved it away. He didn't give into fear. He preferred to channel it into daring. And on the wall there was a convenient map to daring, faded and colorful: Phipps' Arteries. He traced it with one finger – long and white, but dirty under the nail, Squall noticed - over the blue line (from Underhell to The Jeweled Forest) – but didn't find what he was looking for. Only dots meant to represent places like Subtianamen, Rathaus Cave, Kish's Pearl, Io's Lake. The tinny voice over the announcement system was speaking in Renata's language, and it took Seifer some mental effort to disentangle the words, but disentangle them he did, and it said that this line ended at someplace different entirely. The Ripped's Repose. Weird name, but that meant they obviously weren't on the blue line.

Which line, then?

Squall, looking through Seifer's eyes, couldn't find their line either. He couldn't read the words; they were in that curious script that had meaning only to Seifer, and he knew what it meant only after Seifer's brain translated it. But Seifer found it soon enough. The black line was the only one that ended at the Ripped's Repose. And, going by the announcer, they were now between Auspice Avenue and Flesh-Under-Skin.

Nowhere on the black line did he see a dot representing a Gallery.

"What's so bad about it? The Gallery?" he asked Renata, interrupting a litany of charges brought against him that he really hadn't been listening to. What place didn't have charges against him, at this point?

Renata balked at him.

"I—" she said. "They've reserved a spot for you there!"

Just as well. Since Seifer planned to go anyway. But that told him nothing about the potential dangers on the way, or even about why Renata was so determined to save him from it. Not that he would have been dissuaded from his goal even if she'd had a good reason. But still. As a former SeeD cadet, he knew well that one had to have the lay of the land. Too well. Often Cid had concealed information, handed his students half-truths, sprung monsters on them as a means of testing them. And Seifer had faced this deception gamely, but that didn't mean it didn't annoy.

"So what? What is it?" he said. And, more importantly: "Where is it? Is something guarding it?"

"It's for Knights," Renata said slowly. She put a finger to the map and traced along the black line to where it met the red, at a stop designated Beyond Observation, then traced that to a stop a ways off. The Nethercity Museum of Municipal Values.

_A museum? _Squall thought.

"A museum?" said Seifer mockingly. "You're kidding. What? Are they gonna rip out my insides and stuff me and put me on display?"

Renata's anger came through in her wide eyes and grim lip. "Don't even joke about that!"

"You don't even know what they do," Seifer realized.

"They deal with Knights," Renata said firmly. "I know something about it. My sister's assigned there sometimes. That's why I know we have to get you out of here! The danger you face is bigger than the one Fujin and Raijin face. Your friends – they don't have time working against them. You do. You're a Knight. They say that, as there's a Knight to be collected-"

Seifer tuned her out. This made no sense. He'd come on his own. The danger didn't matter. This was his choice. After coming out of Time Compression, he'd felt a tremendous lightness come over him. He wasn't to know what that lightness was, didn't have the words to name it, but it was something very simple: a purpose. He'd had few purposes in his life. Only silly training games and half-baked test missions. He'd longed for a heroic purpose, something to give him some value, but of course he'd flunked the only hero's journey he'd been given just as badly as he'd flunked his SeeD tests, and far more disastrously. But the Gallery represented a whole new purpose. Redemption. For himself. By himself.

He wanted to be able to trust himself again. He'd led himself astray. But now—now he might find some way to regain control. After all, his rescuer had told him that he might have worth, might be more than a complete failure, if only he found the Gallery.

He'd ruined himself. But he could remake himself too. He just had to do what his guardian had said, and find the other Knights. The hungry people. The ones like him.

_I think one of you is probably enough_, Squall thought wryly, and was unheard. Seifer didn't know he was there, and if he had, would he have listened?

Doubtful that he would have.

"—a friend who knows the ways in and out," Renata was saying. "He's said he can take one of you—"

The tinnny voice of the train operator cut through her words.

_This Stop. Beyond Observation. Transfer to the carnelian line_.

Renata was still holding his coat. Suddenly, his coat seemed to Seifer like an old skin, like something he was better off shedding. He let her keep it. Then he twisted out of her way, faster than she could stop him, stepping onto the platform at Beyond Observation, and watching her pound furiously on the glass after him, betrayed. The train pulled away with her still on it.

_She was trying to help you! _cried Squall, entirely unheard.

But Seifer wasn't perturbed by his actions. He rarely was.

The station at Beyond Observation was orange-red tile as far as the eye could see. It was a series of interlocking caves and tunnels with shiny tiled signs and advertisements prominently displayed at each crossing. At the vast stairs leading down to the carnelian line, where the curlicue metal banisters were rubbed pale gold from overuse, Seifer could see signs for Imogen's Iron Ore Chocobos: The Ideal Pet! and Marvels Outside the GeoMenagerie: Take The Sodalite To The Squid's Eye Park!

People rushed to and fro. Some glanced at him. He was out of place. Too tall, feeling suddenly strange without his coat – though he brushed that away. His clothing wasn't right. The style here was robes, like in Esthar. Women's came with veils, which swung down from crowns and jeweled headbands. Fabrics were interwoven with small stones and jewels throughout. Men wore hoods of varying kinds, sometimes peaked or double and triple peaked. Hemlines seemed to convey essential information, a code that suggested conservative adulthood liked kilts and robes that cut at the knee, while brutally forward youth went in for the very long and very short. Metals were key. Metallic bangles, thin crowns, rings, toe rings, armlets, anklets. Seifer's choker was perhaps the only normal thing about him here, being similarly of a kind of unidentified metal (it had been a gift from Cid, as had Squall's ring. He'd never bothered to ask what the metal was, exactly, and for that matter neither had Squall).

But no one stayed staring at him for long. The general mood was one of quiet frenzy. People marched towards their destinations, avoiding eye contact. He seemed to be coming across as a kind of public shock, a street performer of the rudest sort, and this particular crowd was determined not to give him the satisfaction of gaping.

That suited him fine. He told himself he wasn't going to gape either—

_But look around! Where are you?_ said Squall, though he was also always too proud to gape, and had in fact received the city of Esthar, no less stunning and peculiar a place than this one, with a kind of false put-on teenage indifference to hide his internal wonder.

—and in any case Seifer had somewhere to be. He followed the signs to the carnelian line, a platform with high columns where people clustered in groups and a strange figure languidly played the theremin for public amusement and money. The money wasn't gil. Not the standard currency carried over from the days of international peace, the days before Vinzer Deling or Adel, hard-won by a Galbadian-Estharian alliance. This money didn't have the shores of the Western continent on the front and the spires of the Eastern city on the back. It wasn't even paper.

Seifer squinted at it. Octagonal and pentagonal disks, made of various metals or cut from strange green jade, the same substance that had accented his jail cell. The coins made a glittering pile in the theremin player's open case, but no one moved to seize such a very gleaming treasure. Evidently not a lot of money. Just flashy. Satisfied, Seifer passed on.

He found a column near the end of the platform and tucked himself behind it, not to hide, because Seifer didn't do that, but to think. He was close. Close to regaining himself. Close to fixing himself. He could feel it. It ought to have made him happy, plugged up the hungry hole inside him.

It didn't. He felt as hungry as ever.

_Because you can't erase it, Seifer_, Squall thought, with a mental snort. _You can only make up for it. At Garden. With us. But instead you're off to some underground place. Running_.

"What were my other options?" Seifer muttered to himself. "Go back to Garden? Let them decide what my fix should be, whether I needed execution or some crummy salvation? Run away from fixing myself?"

Leave it to Seifer to think in such a backwards fashion. The same general pattern of Squall's thoughts, but rearranged. The wrong way up. Squall wondered if it had always been like this, if Fate had handed them the same stuff, the same ingredients for the same recipe, but Seifer had somehow figured out how to make a car bomb instead of a cake.

An eerie beam of light appeared at the far end of the tunnel. The train. Seifer straightened up from his lounging position on the column and put a firm hand to the hilt of his blade. The train screeched, the tracks gave an answering tap tap, and before long the carnelian line (traveling in the direction of the Cavern of Hollow Might) stopped before him. He was situated at the point two cars met. A tangle of wires filled his vision for a half-second, connecting a green, crowded car like the one Renata had led him into earlier to one that was black, with diamond-paned windows. The doors to the green one opened. The black stayed closed. Seifer put a hand to it, trying to wrench it open. It didn't open. He felt oddly cheated. He would have liked to see what was in the black cars, if these were the deluxe cars certain people weren't allowed to take.

After a half-second of thought, he took hold of one of the wires and stepped onto the small platform between the cars: a precarious place. A frosted diamond window filled his vision. He couldn't see through it. As the train started up again, he tried the door on this end, but it wouldn't budge, and he had to content himself with holding onto the wires as the train lurched and sped down the track.

When things were forbidden to him, he usually wondered why, and disliked not knowing why, and disliked having things forbidden even if he did know why. This had made him a very poor Garden cadet. Now it left him perched in an odd place, trapped between the car he could have taken and the one he wanted to take, between an easy choice he wanted to reject and an impossible one he wanted to embrace.

_I bet you end up like this a lot_, Squall sighed.

_...I have got to stop ending up like this_, Seifer thought to himself, as if in answer to Squall.

Eventually, Seifer turned and faced the door to the green car. Its window was clear and gave him an easy view of the regular passengers inside. This train was no less crowded than the first, the people no less mystifying. But Seifer was no more interested in them than before. He'd glided through life like this at Garden, rarely caring for anyone beyond his immediate friends group if he could help it, so this inattention didn't surprise Squall. Squall had been much the same, possibly worse. But now Squall saw this behavior in a new light.

Through the window, people shuffled in and out at each stop, read strange books and played strange games with their children, begged for coins, danced for coins, too. One woman drew back her veil to adjust her hair, demurely, turning her head to the side, and the gesture had a fluidity to it that was so like Rinoa that it gave Squall pause. A small child on the rickety green seat was shuffling his feet to no discernible pattern. The action suggested that here sat a budding Zell Dincht, unable to sit straight, calm only when he was moving. His mother was a Quistis, primly stopping him with one decisive hand, never raising her voice in censure. A man in the corner had a hood that covered all but his eyes; these he rested on a woman next to him, with all the hidden ardor and suggested frailty that Irvine possessed, when he happened to be looking at Selphie.

All Seifer did now with these people was look them over for potential aggression, for a threat, in the manner drilled into him at Garden. But the only aggressiveness to them was that they were aggressively normal, for all their costuming. They weren't a threat. And standing just beyond the door where he couldn't be seen, weapon at the ready, as Seifer was doing, was a sufficient response to them. This behavior would have earned him decent marks on a SeeD test.

But it wasn't the right behavior, Squall felt. It wasn't so much that Seifer ought to intrude on them. It was just that, beyond having assessed them as potential obstacles, he wasn't recognizing them at all. They had as much humanity for him as the straps that hung from the ceiling of the train. There was a soldier's arrogance to his behavior, a dehumanizing arrogance that weighed people and found them below consideration, purely for failing to be sufficiently dangerous.

_Rinoa_, Squall thought faintly, to himself. _This is a Rinoa thought I'm having_. And he was strangely glad. Even if he was also pleased Seifer couldn't hear him, because Seifer would have laughed himself silly over Squall Leonhart worrying about people's humanity. But Seifer was too busy thinking about if the museum would have an entrance fee, how best to muscle his way inside, how to quickly and efficiently locate the Gallery. Tactics. In typical Seifer Almasy fashion, the tactics revolved around a completely ridiculous aim, a pipe dream. But they were still structurally sound, Garden-approved, basic enter-and-retrieve stuff, except that there was nothing to retrieve but Seifer's sense of self-worth.

_At least he knows he wasted it away_, Squall sighed. After some reflection, he had to admit that Seifer still had some worth to him, as a member of the old gang, at least. But there was no doubt that he also had some serious life assessment to do. And he was going about it entirely the wrong way. Specifically, to go by the train announcements they could hear through the doors, he was going in the direction of:

Llorosa Crossing.

Bear's Bones Avenue.

Lilac Smoke Lake, transfer to the malachite line.

Creeps-Under-Sun.

Strangely, at this stop the doors to the green cars didn't open. The black cars, which had remained closed otherwise, did. It took Seifer a moment to realize this. By the time he'd craned his head around the side of the car to try and catch a glimpse of the people entering and leaving the black cars, the train was already moving again. He almost overbalanced and had to hold on to the wires to keep from falling beneath the train. Inside his head, Squall swore, and then marveled at how calm Seifer was about this near-death experience, how satisfied he was to have regained his balance, how thrilled almost dying had left him.

_Still alive_, Seifer thought to himself, after the initial rush of terror had faded. _I'll be ready next time, too. Maybe get onto the black car._

But the black cars didn't open for:

Buried Maidens Street,

Final Summons, transfer to the citrine line,

Or Coffinstairs Passage.

When they did open, there was no point getting onto them. They'd reached the museum.

* * *

As Squall slumbered, Xu, upstairs in her office, received a call. It was from exactly the man she'd been looking for.

"Quistis gave me this list of GFs," she said, getting right to the most important topic. If she didn't start off the conversation, Cid was likely to take command, and with Cid in command she might have to strap in for a lot of meandering: deep reflections, confused asides, and fatherly advice. Which Xu didn't hold against him because at least Cid had taught her to deal with people like him, people who didn't get to the point. That was a useful skill in her line of work; a lot of politicos were like Cid. The president of Esthar, in particular, liked to include as much useless personal information as possible in every meeting: at least seven pointless anecdotes per conversation.

Cid started to say something, but stopped. There was silence.

"The GF list," Xu said again, "Is it complete? We've had some minor setbacks on the GF front, so while I hate to pressure you on this—" She didn't, really. It was just polite to say so, "—we need to narrow down exactly which one might have been in use, because if it's a new one—"

"It's a new one," Cid said quietly.

"Well, we can't know that for sure until someone goes out to Galbadia and checks, and…" she hesitated. Someone had done that. She'd deliberately told them it might be a new GF, but had been hoping it was an old one used unlawfully. That way they could have made a bigger public show of Galbadia's violation of their agreement. Instead, Galbadia had snatched one of their own and made a public show of him.

Needless to say, the results didn't reflect well on Garden, let alone Garden as owned by Xu. She would shake down the whole team later to figure out exactly where and how they'd gone wrong. After Irvine Kinneas got some rest, Rinoa Heartilly stopped demanding her boyfriend, and Selphie Tilmitt… stuck around. But right now she had no idea where and how they'd tipped off Caraway (Rinoa; it had probably been Rinoa) and anyway, it didn't matter. She didn't want to look bad in front of Cid. Cid wasn't a perfect man, but he was her mentor. And he'd left the school in her care. Given some SeeD operations over to Squall, and some instructor tasks to Quistis; fine, why not, he obviously thought Xu couldn't do it all herself, and good delegation was key to great leadership anyway, so fine. But she was one of his earliest graduates – the only one in her class who hadn't ultimately burned out – and he trusted her, and she wanted him to trust her. Garden was hers now, and she was doing well with it.

"There were some setbacks," she said diplomatically. "I assure you that I, together with Squall, will ferret out the SeeDs responsible."

Well. She would. Squall had blinders on when it came to his friends and would probably protest. Even though she was only going to suggest maybe docking their pay to show that discipline had been meted out. She wasn't going to make him kick them out: they were still too high-profile to loose on the world, still good SeeDs, and, depending on who took the blame, the results could be personally catastrophic. Selphie had family that loved her, so if it was her fault, that wasn't so bad. Though she was generally competent, tough as nails, and so crucial to the order here that losing her would be a blow. But Irvine Kinneas was one of those dust in the wind desert cowboy vagabond types. Where would he even go? He was such a slacker by nature that he'd probably be homeless within a week if SeeD threw him out. Xu couldn't have that on her conscience. Better to keep him here, where he would be useful. And who knew? If he stayed on long enough, when he started to lose his looks and began his slide into an inevitable late-thirties/early-forties nervous breakdown, he would then have access to the proper medication. Garden took care of its own.

"It's a new GF, Xu," Cid said. "Listen—"

"Quistis's team had some setbacks as well," Xu confessed, before he could derail her. "I'm sure it wasn't her fault, or the Commander's—" It might have been Squall's fault. He wasn't half as careful as people thought he was. Sometimes he didn't seem to care about the job at all, not that Cid would like hearing that. "—but we'll figure that out, too. I'm mentioning it because they were on your mission. They attempted to contact you before they left, but you weren't home."

This was, of course, her obliquely asking where the hell he'd been. She couldn't just ask. Cid was, after all, retired. His time was his own. Though, come to think of it, he'd often done whatever the hell he'd wanted as Headmaster: picked favorites, focused excessively on the gunblade specialists, let the Shumi handle anything he didn't personally want to deal with, and spent way too much time avoiding the topic of his dangerous sorceress wife. So his time had been his own then, too.

Xu respected the man for what he'd accomplished, but his methods had always been spectacularly selfish. That was Cid for you.

After a pause, Cid said, "I'm in Trabia."

Oh. _Oh_. With Edea. Weird. It was weird to think of Cid married. He was fatherly and round and thoroughly sexless in the eyes of all his students. Personality-wise, he was kind of a coward. Xu privately felt that no one should have wanted to marry him. She respected Cid, but it seemed to violate some unspoken law of nature to think that anyone might find Cid marriage material.

"Sure, with Edea," Xu said. "You and your wife. Nothing more natural in the universe, Cid."

Cid took in a sharp breath. There was another pause. The pause stretched. And stretched. This was very unlike him. He was a chatty man. He tended to dominate conversations. As the founder of Garden, he was generally allowed to blather on as much as he wanted, and in fact rarely turned down an opportunity to do so.

"Something's happened," Cid said.

That was it. Nothing more. Just more hard breathing on the other end of the line. Then some odd sounds. Xu couldn't see his face because he was a million years old and hadn't sprung for a vid phone. But. Was he crying?

"What was it?" Xu asked. "What is it?"

A thousand possibilities raced through her mind. Well. No. That was a lie. Mostly just one raced through, over and over again. The Trabians had finally snapped and attacked Edea. They didn't like Edea very much, and who could blame them? Xu didn't like her that much, for that matter. Trabia Garden had been a useful feeder school, and would have made a great asset, geographically, now that Esthar had opened up its borders, if Edea-under-Ultimecia, and Seifer, hadn't tanked it.

Plus Edea had apparently raised a whole bunch of kids who, with the exception of Quistis and maybe Dincht, were basically walking neuroses. That really spoke volumes about her as a person.

But if Trabia had snapped and attacked Cid's wife, then that meant conflict within the Garden system. And Xu had enough of that to deal with. Galbadia Garden was so entwined with Deling's military and so toxic, thanks to Martine, that she didn't even want to try and salvage it, bring it under B-Garden control. It would be more trouble than it was worth. It was enough to bargain with the Galbadians for the important stuff: the Garden name, the GFs, certain weapons caches. They could keep everything else.

But she didn't want to lose Trabia. Those kids made good SeeDs. Slightly (not by much, just slightly) less messed up than the Balamb bunch.

"Alright, never mind," Xu said. Did he not want to say the words? Was he emotionally overcome and too weak to handle the ugly reality? Cid often was. That was fine. "I know what it is. It's Edea, isn't it? The point is that we need to handle it carefully, or it could hit Garden hard. You don't want to compromise Garden, do you, Cid?"

Surely he wouldn't. Cid might be buffoonish in some ways, and he might have terrible taste in favorite students. But he'd built Garden. He owed it to Garden to have their best interests at heart; Garden was in many ways just a collection of useful foundlings who wouldn't be where they were, for better or for worse, if it hadn't been for Cid. They loved Cid, and Cid owed them, and they stood by Cid, and Cid owed them. It was a tangled relationship, but one that made sense in Xu's mind.

"I need a team out here, then," Cid said, still breathing hard. "I won't let anything hurt Garden's image, Xu. But I need a team. Give me the same one I had before."

"No, they're—" Xu began, cursing internally. Now she'd have to explain just how that mission had gone wrong, too. And she wasn't sure she knew the answer yet.

"It will seem less suspicious that way," Cid said. "They were already working for me. Send me Squall, Zell, and Quistis. Have they woken from their sleep yet?"

"Zell has," Xu admitted. "And Quistis was never asleep."

Wait. What?

"…how did you know they were asleep?" Xu asked.

* * *

Downstairs, Selphie was shrieking.

"I knew it!" she said, triumphant. "I knew they went to hell!"

Her friends mostly gave her piteous glances in response, even Zell, even though he'd just admitted that the very gates of hell had been opened. Right?

"No," Quistis said, shaking her head. "No. I'm sorry. It's not hell-"

Irvine said, "It's probably just part of the original dig site. You know, from way back when Deling City was excavating the place. They probably just set up a mechanized stairwell in - in Odin's chamber..."

He broke off. Apparently the same thought that was occurring to Selphie was occurring to him: how could anyone have excavated that part of the Ruins with Odin there? And anyway, clearly the Deling City excavators hadn't gotten very far. When the Orphanage Gang had visited the Ruins, there had been many places left clearly untouched. Too many hidden chambers with their treasures remaining.

But before Irvine could capitulate and admit that she was right, Zell broke in.

"I've been thinking about it," he said. "It's not hell, alright? 'Cause that's crazy. Only religious nutjobs think-"

"Hey!" Selphie said.

"-that hell exists. But there is somethin' down there, man! I've seen it, through Raijin. This is why it's a mission," he added stubbornly. "My mission. That's the number one job of a SeeD: to go where nobody else dares to go, to do what nobody else dares to do. Though I guess I can't say that nobody's gone down there, since, I mean, there are people down there, but-"

"What?" said Irvine.

"What?" said Quistis.

And even Selphie wanted to say it. What?

People in hell. Well. Sure, everyone was supposed to get there eventually. Hyne's birthplace. But it wasn't supposed to have people: it was supposed to have monsters. Or dead children. Or the vengeful spirits of the dead. Or the vengeful spirits of dead children who were monsters. The stories were very clear on that. Maybe it was a metaphor.

"Maybe it's a place where all the moon monsters can talk to you, and it turns out they think they're Hyne's first children, and anyway it doesn't matter because they're dead inside. I mean emotionally, because it's a metaphor," Selphie proposed.

This time it was everyone's turn to say it.

"_What_?"

Well, it made sense to her.

"Look," Zell said, shaking his head. "I-I don't even know if I believe that what I was dreaming was the truth. I mean, I think it is. But this next part is the part that doesn't make any sense to me. Like maybe Fujin kicked Raijin so hard that he was seein' things, and part of me thinks that instead of real life I got his-his hallucinations..."

He broke off, looking troubled.

"But he _is _in trouble," he finished.

"I'll bet he is," said Rinoa.

Everyone stared at her. Somehow she'd been silent this whole time, and somehow by her silence it was like she-like she hadn't even been in the room with them. Selphie couldn't explain it. It was just the odd sense she had, like at some point Rinoa had decided to tune them out, or tune herself out, or somehow stand outside the group and observe them, unbeknownst to the rest, like she had calmly opened up the moment and taken a few steps outside time itself.

What was it she'd told Selphie and Irvine?

Junctioning Seifer was doing things to her magic. Creepy things, it looked like.

"I'll bet Raijin's in a bad way," Rinoa said again, very pointedly, "Because Raijin has bad taste in friends!"

"Well, yeah-" Zell tried.

"Fine, maybe I do too! I definitely had bad taste in the past!" Rinoa said, ignoring him.

"I didn't-" Zell began.

"Shut up," said Rinoa.

Zell said, "I-"

And Irvine, shaking his head, said, "She's not talking to you, Zell."

Selphie, remembering how annoyed she was to have Seifer lurking in their midst without revealing himself, said, "Show them, Rinoa."

"What?" Rinoa said, stopping mid-argument and blinking at her.

For one instant, she was the old Rinoa again. Normal. Not totally in control or out of control or whatever Sorceress Rinoa was. Just a nice, helpful girl, unsure of where she stood relative to the group and to SeeD and to the world. So Selphie pressed the advantage.

"Show them," she commanded. "_You're _junctioning _him_, Rinoa. He's not junctioning you. And Zell and Quistis don't know he's here-"

Zell and Quistis were looking appropriately mystified by the whole conversation.

"-so you have to show them! If he's a GF, then just summon him!"

Rinoa cocked her head for a moment, as though she were listening to input from Seifer.

"Oh yes," she said.

She did nothing for a minute.

"Oh yes," she said again. She had a wicked glint in her eyes, but it was a normal wicked glint like the kind she got when she was making fun of Squall for something, not a sorceress-y wicked glint. So Selphie welcomed it.

"You're a GF!" Rinoa said delightedly, like the full implications of this hadn't occurred to her before. "Which means, Seifer, that I control you!"

And then she did just that.

The very air in the room seemed to draw back from itself, an invisible curtain, so that they were in the space and not in it, somehow present and not present, dancing on the edge of reality and unreality.

A summoning.

Only. Only GFs were supposed to be beastly. They came with claws and jaws, they bit and howled. Or else they were untouchable, divine. They played holy music, they changed the world to suit their needs, they floated in on threads of crystal and held in their hands all the sky itself. GFs had a touch of whatever it was children dreamed up at night, the unreal becoming all too real. They were like nothing so much as the great shadowy figures under the bed, that seemed to grow and grow in the mind until they dominated every dark corner and filled it with ghastly presence.

But Seifer only looked like Seifer.

"It's just you," Selphie said, disappointed. "It just looks like you." She dimly registered that Zell and Quistis were each drawing back with a yell, astonished, and that Irvine was hurriedly stepping towards the examination room, probably to make sure Dr. Kadowaki didn't come rushing in at all the noise.

"Just looks like me?" Seifer said, looking down his nose at her. "There's no just about the way I look, Messenger Girl, unless it's how I'm just very tall, just have great hair, just dress better than most of the slouches here-"

"When you aren't letting a sorceress play havoc with your mind," Selphie said.

"Hey, I'll agree that there's nothing just about him," Quistis breathed out.

Seifer scowled.

Rinoa crossed her arms at him, all annoyance, and said, "Well, if you're going to make faces at people, I'm going to put you right back."

Seifer whirled on her. "I didn't want you to take me out!" he snapped. "Do you think I wanna sit here and talk to every chicken wuss, G-Garden pervert, and stick in the mud instructor you hang out with these days? I told you not to summon me! I told you I would talk to you and Squall. Not to them."

And Rinoa did something unexpected. She shrugged.

"Seifer," she said simply. "They're my friends. They always help me with my problems. And you're not a friend anymore. Now you're just a problem yourself. One I can trust them to help me deal with."

_Harsh_, Selphie thought, in spite of herself. Harsh, but, in characteristic Rinoa Heartilly fashion, not said unkindly. Just said in a matter of fact way, a truthful way.

Which didn't keep Seifer from staggering back, as though he'd been slapped in the face. He staggered right through Zell, as Zell existed on the earthly plane of humanity, and Seifer now existed on the GF plane, all magic unreality. Zell looked vaguely horrified to have Seifer passing through his body, but the horror quickly rearranged itself into grim satisfaction. That was a strange look on Zell.

"You can definitely trust us to help," he addressed Rinoa, ignoring Seifer. "I've got a feeling my Raijin problem and your Seifer problem are the same problem anyway."

"Of course they are," Quistis said, definitely addressing Seifer. She pointed one judgmental finger at him. "Because he's obviously gone and landed his friends in trouble!"

Seifer looked at her balefully, proudly, like he didn't want to admit to anything. But then Irvine trailed back in, walking between them, and said, "The question is what kind of trouble they're in. Are Fujin and Raijin GFs too?"

"Maybe they're both being tortured," Zell said, for no reason that Selphie could glean.

"Well, whatever's happening to them, I bet it's bad!" said Quistis accusingly.

With every word, Seifer's face became more and more carefully blank. But this didn't fool Selphie, and she figured it wouldn't fool anyone else, either. He was furious, and trying to hide his fury. Well. Good. She was furious too, over Trabia Garden. And Zell was probably furious over a childhood full of bullying, and Rinoa over being fed to Adel, and Quistis over having to fight her own student, and Irvine over having to fight an old friend.

If Seifer wanted to get enraged, then that was just fine. Seifer deserved some rage.

"You haven't been all that kind to your friends, have you, Seifer?" said Selphie. And she didn't just mean Fujin and Raijin. A part of her - the long-lost part, the Centran part, the wild charge of Cid and Edea Kramer - meant to make Seifer remember what he'd had, once. Long ago. The Orphanage Gang.

What Seifer had willingly traded away.

Seifer looked down. His mouth made a kind of grimace.

The grimace became a smile.

"Have any of you checked after your friends lately?" Seifer said, looking up at them sharply. He held out his hands theatrically, like he was setting up a big joke. "Your saviors, your commanders, your _boyfriends_?" he added, transferring his gaze to Rinoa.

She stiffened.

"Squall!"

"Right," Seifer said, like he was talking to a small child. "Here you all are, recounting old stories, and in the next room, who knows? He could be suffering-"

"There's nothing we can do!" Quistis interjected. "Ellone took him-"

"Did you try to do anything?" Seifer said. "Hyne, Cid and Edea know more about Ellone's powers than anybody. Did you call 'em? Or did you just give up after bringing him back here, thinking Garden, oh of course Garden'll deal with it, Garden always does, even though Garden's good for nothing you don't put into it. But you never bothered to think about that. Instead you ended up sitting around just trading gossip, letting other things distract you, wishing he would wake up. Like children. Not acting to solve your problems. Just hopin' they'll work out somehow."

They stared at him. Quistis, Zell, and Selphie all opened their mouths to protest, then closed them again.

He was right.

He knew he was. His smile grew bigger, all shark teeth. He laughed. Then he doubled up. Then he kept on laughing.

"Wow," Seifer said. "I knew it. You're all pathetic."

"Seifer-" Rinoa began furiously.

"Oh, it's not your fault, Rin," he said magnanimously, holding out an arm to her with a kind of false chivalry. "You were distracted with, well. Me." He nodded rapidly a few times, like he thought this was a worthy distraction, which Selphie bet he did, the smarmy jerk.

"But the rest of you?" Seifer continued, his tone becoming more vicious. "Useless without your leader around. Do you know where his mind is? Do you have any clue what's happenin' to him?"

"Do you?" Rinoa shot back.

Seifer leaned back on absolutely nothing, on the air itself. The air held him there. After a moment, he kicked up his feet, dramatic, and the air held those too, so that he was reclining suspended on nothing, like he didn't have a problem in the world.

"I do," he said easily. "Like I said, he was where he shouldn't've been. Is. He is where he shouldn't be."

"Elaborate!" Rinoa said, her tone going cold and dark and ugly, and now Selphie had some idea of what she must have been arguing for on the way to Garden.

"Why should I?" Seifer muttered, half to himself. But after a minute, before Rinoa could jump up and claw at him (which it looked like she was going to do; the wild, unknowable quality she'd had before was rapidly returning to her), he said, louder, to the group, "But I guess I will. Since you're bringin' my friends into it. I guess I'll tell you if you really do take our mission."

"Your mission?" Zell asked, sounding just as ugly as Rinoa.

"Rescue Raijin, rescue Fujin," Seifer said, shrugging. "Nothing you heroes wouldn't have done anyway. Easy enough. But you've gotta take me along with you; I've got scores to settle down there. And you've gotta let me take control of myself once, just once, when I ask you to. None of this GF-master stuff. Let me have power over me, one time. Do that, and I pledge to help Squall in any way I can."

He crossed his arms behind his head, in a restful pose. But his eyes measured each of them in turn, and his lips continued to offer that shark grin.

Rinoa blinked at him. Powerful, perplexing, she grinned back.

"Deal," she said.

"Deal," said Zell, shortly after.

"I'm in," Selphie said, because if Rinoa and Zell were going to get caught up with the worst GF in the world, then she wasn't going to let them suffer for it.

"Me too," Irvine said quickly.

"Fine," Quistis said, in a tone that said_ I hope you choke on your ego_ instead.

"Good," said Seifer, all fake kindness now. "Very good. We get eachother. Well, kids. Squall's in a very special place. Squall's in-well. My past. A few months ago, to be exact, not too long after I made it down to the Netherworld. So I guess you could say Squall's in hell."

Seifer shot a look at the room where Squall was silently screaming, writhing under Dr. Kadowaki's frantic ministrations.

"Serves him right," Seifer added.


	19. Chapter 19

Edea woke to a kaleidoscope of colors. Blue, orange, purple – a light show and a shape show. Intricate, glossy star tessellations all whirring by very fast. Why was it moving so quickly?

It took her a moment to realize that the display outside, colors and crystals and strange flourescent fungi - none of that was moving at all. She was the one moving. She was lying on a cushioned berth in some kind of train car, with a window to her left. And she'd woken to the sight of the tunnel outside.

The train was moving soundlessly down the tunnel. She knew they were going down because her berth was slanted; she wasn't quite lying flat. The whole train car was careening down the tunnel at an angle.

"It's the fastest passage up or down," someone said.

Edea started. She hadn't realized anyone was in the car with her. But there was a man kneeling on the berth above her. He poked his head down and looked at her inquisitively. He was handsome in an unusual way, young-looking, with very pronounced cheekbones and large dark eyes that reminded Edea of ancient moon beasts. He seemed calm and maybe even satisfied by something, but faded somehow. Something about him looked ill.

"Why are we going down?" Edea said, after a minute.

She tried to determine how she came to be here. She remembered visiting Trabia, upsetting the locals. She remembered the hotel. She remembered—

"Seifer!" she said, and, shocked, prodded her shoulder gingerly. He had _stabbed_ her.

At this point the young man swung down from his berth. He wore a coat with a red cowl, a vaguely familiar sight though Edea couldn't place where she'd seen it before, and his cowl was pushed back. He looked at Edea frankly and said, "I healed you. One moment. We can go out and then I'll explain."

From his berth he pulled down a sturdy leather case. He pressed the side of the wall and it swung open, and on the other side there was a small compartment with a table and two chairs and another door inset. He gestured at Edea to sit down. She did so. He pulled open his case and removed some papers. He arranged these before Edea. She felt disoriented. It seemed to her that she had to be imagining that he had what looked like her doctor's papers, her test results all arrayed in front of them.

After a moment she realized that he had just that. There was Dr. Odine's signature on the bottom of one. There, on another, was her blood analysis. And Rinoa Heartilly's.

"You used to be a sorceress," the young man said, without preamble. It was not a question.

Edea didn't like that. And she didn't like that she didn't know where she was or what was going on. It reminded her of those horrible moments when she'd come back to herself after Ultimecia,that split second where she'd realized that she'd given in to some of her darkest impulses and let – let someone else take control. So she took back control of the conversation. She answered, "Where are we going?"

"To some place where no one will hate you for what you used to be," the young man said easily.

"I haven't agreed to go anywhere—" Edea began.

"We all end up down there eventually," the young man said.

"We?" said Edea, half-dreading the answer.

The young man snapped his fingers. Fire blossomed up in them, caught in his thin palm. It didn't seem to burn him.

"Are you like Adel?" Edea ventured.

Magic usually went to women, of course. Magic users were called sorceresses. The convention was to refer to them all as _she_. But of course magic cared very little for conventions. Magic didn't know the difference between a man and a woman.

"I'm like you," the man said, the brightness of his eyes dimming somewhat. "I had something, and I lost it."

Edea was reminded very suddenly of Squall. Not the young, beloved boy she'd taken care of. But the lost, determined, sad young man he'd become. And Seifer, too, came to mind. Not the wonderful, inquisitive, brave Seifer who had terrorized the orphanage. But the stooped, hungry, angry young man she'd helped snare, the one act she would never forgive herself for.

"Did you feel pain, when you lost your powers?" demanded the young man now. He was now breathing heavily. He put a hand to his head, ran it through his long hair, and shuddered. "Did it hurt? Did your body tell you something was wrong?"

Edea shook her head.

The young man looked at her, despairing.

"I wasn't hurt either," he told Edea. "But I know that all that was in me is gone. I know it, Edea."

For a moment, Edea wondered how he knew her name. But then she chastised herself for such a stupid thought. Of course he knew. How could he not know? She was infamous. And there were bigger questions: how he'd obtained her medical results, and why she thought she could remember Seifer attacking her. Was that a memory? Or some kind of warning? Or just her guilt?

"You haven't asked how I know you, Edea," said the young man.

Edea stared at him.

The young man said, "You and I have been connected for some time. And also, Edea, I have heard of you. Raijin told us all about you. You and your SeeDs planted in sun."

* * *

"You went to see Edea," Xu repeated, "because you needed her help with the same thing that made you put Zell, Squall, and - you thought - Quistis to sleep?"

On the other end of the line, possibly Cid nodded. Xu couldn't tell. She couldn't see it; this wasn't a vidphone. Either way he didn't make any concrete noises in the affirmative, so, just to be sure, she repeated it again.

She felt as though a great many things were unraveling. She looked out at her massive desk, covered in papers and files and lamps and takeout from the caf. It looked like a mess. And when she visualized Garden, that also looked like a mess, because it was a Garden perched precariously between Fury Caraway and the Estharians, like the rest of the world, and now the Fury Caraway and the Estharians had a weak spot to prod at: five or six unhinged orphans, products of Cid, who apparently thought it was fine to drug his charges.

Well. Drug them with more than GFs, anyway.

"It should be a very productive sleep," Cid offered, after a minute.

"Right," Xu said, latching onto that although she had no idea what it meant. "It should be. Naturally. I trust that you wouldn't have-"

Wait. She stopped herself. Rewound back the events of the day in her mind. Recalled the frozen, horrified figure of Squall Leonhart. What did Cid mean: productive?

"Define," Xu managed, in as even a voice as she could muster.

"I'm sorry; I don't know what you mean," Cid said gently.

Xu counted to ten in her head. Took a breath. Said, "Okay, first of all, Cid, how did you put them to sleep?"

"The usual way," Cid admitted. "I had them drink something."

"Sleeping powder, but transmuted," Xu guessed.

"Sure. Let's say that," said Cid.

Xu felt a spike of irritation. This was her Headmaster, she reminded herself. The man who'd seen something in her, who'd raised her up as his successor, who trusted in her judgment. So by all rights she should trust in his. Right?

No. Fuck it. He owed her an explanation.

"Or you could just tell me what it really was!"

"No, I don't think I will," Cid said.

Did he not trust her? Was that it? Did he think she would turn against him? Cid did have his odd moments of paranoia, and Hyne knew he was entitled to them, with the life he'd led. But Xu's loyalty to him and to Garden was absolute, and he had to know that. Did he know that? Had she made it clear enough?

"Cid, if you tell me," she said. "I can help you do whatever it was you were planning to do. You know I can."

She could. She had all Garden at her disposal. He'd given it to her, this strange inheritance. But sometimes it felt like Cid was still in charge, both of Garden and of her. That ought to have been more horrible than comforting, but unfortunately it was both. It was good and bad in equal measure. She was a product of Cid, too.

"I suppose you can. But if I tell you, you have to agree to do everything I say, Xu," Cid said.

Well. Obviously. When hadn't Xu followed his orders? She was a good SeeD, and even if Cid was rarely her first priority - that was always Garden itself - she had never once gone back on what Cid wanted.

"Of course," Xu said. "So not sleep. What, then? Some kind of torture spell? Cid, why? Squall looks-"

"I'm sure he's not having the best time. Productivity sometimes takes a little pain," Cid said mildly. "But no. Not a torture spell. Let's call it... the Rip spell."

Xu stared out at her desk, confused. She'd completed the entire Garden curriculum and never once heard of a Rip spell. She was sure of it. Of course, if Cid had put it in the textbooks and manuals and she'd missed it somehow, then she could hardly tell him she didn't know it. She'd look awful then, and he'd think she wasn't worthy of her post. So she said nothing.

"It's a spell," Cid continued, "With many wonderful uses. And I suppose one side effect is that it takes you out of yourself for a time. That's what's happening to Squall. But he'll be wiser, more knowledgeable, when he returns."

"When will he return?" Xu asked.

Cid made a noncommittal sound. He didn't know, Xu guessed.

"Why did you decide to do this to him?" Xu said.

"As I said, for the same reason I needed Edea," said Cid. "For the mission."

The mission, the mission. What was Cid's mission? Something stupid, if Xu recalled correctly.

"Sinkholes?" she asked disbelievingly.

"Passageways," Cid sighed.

"To where?"

"That," Cid said thoughtfully, "Is truly the question."

It was hard to get a straight answer out of Cid on a good day. But this was worse than he'd ever been before. Every answer he gave seemed to prompt only more questions.

"Why did you want us to investigate the sinkholes, Cid?" Xu asked, tugging on one of the few threads Cid had offered her, hoping it would lead her to a concrete answer. Usually it did. Cid dissuaded most people, but Xu he never could; Xu followed his every trail, turned over every stone, until she understood what he wanted. He'd told her once that it was a very impressive trait. Xu was still proud of that.

"I believe there's a great deal of power down there," Cid said. "Wherever these sinkholes lead."

"Why do you believe that?" said Xu.

"Research," Cid said, still maddeningly obtuse about the whole thing.

Xu could ask about the research, but her instincts told her that it would be a dead end. Cid often became mysterious like this when he wanted you to press on with a topic, because he wanted you to think you were on the right trail when you weren't. Stupid cadets fell for that, kids who would let Cid spin them wild stories of knights or sorceresses or what have you. But Xu was smarter than that. She rewound the conversation again, went back to the question of Cid's motive.

"Is that why you wanted us to investigate?" Xu said. "Because you wanted to give Garden more power?"

This was a motive she could get behind, at least. This was enough to solidify her trust in Cid, to keep this working relationship going smoothly.

"...no," Cid said, after a minute. "That isn't why. It wasn't really why."

Xu made a face without realizing it and ran an irritated hand through her hair, leaving it all askew. Before she could say anything, Cid spoke again.

Cid said, very softly, "We lost something, you know. Garden. Or maybe not Garden. But I lost something."

"I-" Xu began, then stopped, still befuddled. She gathered her wits. Follow the thread. Follow the thread, Xu.

"What did you lose?"

Cid sighed.

"Well, my dear," he said. "You've lost a few things yourself. And wouldn't it be nice if you could get them back? If we could get down there and take back what we lost, well. Then I would have my old identity back, I suppose."

Xu tried to follow this, but it was too much. It wasn't a thread; it was a knot. She couldn't disentangle it.

"The identity of Headmaster?" she guessed, feeling dread sink into her very bones. Did Cid just want his old job back? Was he testing her? Was this his way of firing her? Could he fire her?

Would she fight him if he did? Could she live with herself if she didn't fight him?

"Oh no," Cid said, still in that soft, low tone. "No, I mean the person I was before all that. Before Garden."

Silence. Then:

"Well. Remember that you agreed to do anything I say. And I say send me the ones that have woken up - Zell and Quistis, if you have them. And if not them, then some of the others in the group. You know which group I mean. Rinoa Heartilly among them. Send me her at all costs, and then one or two of the others. By tomorrow morning."

Then he cut the call.

Xu stared at the phone in her hand, befuddled. She caught a glimpse of herself in one of the mirrored panels on the lift to the control tower. Her hair was all out of place, her collar had come undone, and her expression looked thoroughly disheartened. This wasn't her. And yet, with the former Garden Headmaster suddenly so alien, it _was_.

She felt off-balance, and she didn't like that feeling. It wasn't her; it wasn't who she was. She wasn't supposed to feel this way. This was wrong. It made the whole world wrong.

And then the world got a little worse. Her monitor began screeching at her. A vid call. A high priority one, from Esthar, from the presidential line. Xu hurriedly rearranged her hair and her collar, mostly managing to make everything worse, and hit the accept button before the call could transfer to one of the lower admin SeeDs, who would only make a mess of it.

"Hello!" President Laguna Loire said brightly. "Headmistress, Esthar humbly requests - oh. Are you alright? You look terrible."

Xu stared at him.

Sheepishly, he said, "Sorry. Sorry. I could look pretty terrible in my time, too, so don't worry. It's not what you look like! It's what's in your heart! Once, when I was working as a reporter, I had to ride chocobo-back with Kiros - you know Kiros, my advisor - across the Kashkabald. Anyway, there I was, bumpy as a bite bug in the ocean, and-"

She didn't have time for this.

"What is it, Mr. President? What do you need? More cleanup SeeDs?"

"Oh!" Laguna Loire said, holding up his hands. "No. The ones you sent were great! But no. We're just calling to let you know that we're heading over."

"What?" Xu said.

"Well," said the President uncomfortably. "I mean us: me, Ellone, some attaches, a couple of Presidential Aides. We're heading over. Ellone tells me something's gone wrong with Sq-with the Commander. And I thought-"

Oh no.

"You thought what?" Xu said, her tone icy. "You don't have any legal right-"

"Actually, I do," said President Loire. "Please let's stop pretending like no one knows. I'm his father. That's got to give me some visiting rights or something under the Garden charter."

Horribly, Xu had no idea if it did. Most Garden kids were orphans. She had a father, but he'd never tried to demand legal rights relative to Garden, which was just as well, because if he had she would have denied him any.

"I doubt it," she said now. "For when are you planning this little visit?"

Loire checked his fancy Estharian watch.

"In about two minutes?" he offered, sounding apologetic. "That's when we'll get there. See, we're already on our way.

"We'll make it up to you if you want. But if Squall's in danger, then I want to be there. I want to help."

* * *

At the Museum of Municipan Values, Seifer was the only person to get off the train. He kept his gunblade close as he strode through the black-tiled station, expecting guards, but when he came upon some guards something strange happened: they lifted their weapons, peered at him through their hoods, and then put their weapons down again.

Squall buzzed with warning. _What's going on? Don't they want to fight you? You can't be allowed to just walk in, can you?_

Seifer thought the same. Not having to fight was a bizarre phenomenon for him. He was almost disappointed. But then – he reminded himself – it was just a museum. Who cared if he went in or not? Even if he did look strange, with no hood or robe and his gunblade in his hand.

Here are the things he encountered in the museum, the jumble of rooms and galleries and grand halls Squall caught a glimpse of from inside Seifer's head:

No entrance fee. Wide double doors made of gleaming metal with crystal knobs, wide open. A grey and pale old woman manning the desk labeled Information; she waved Seifer to a second desk, labeled Check Your Faulty Ideals. Seifer had many faulty ideals and should have checked them, but didn't. He just looked down at the girl manning the desk, daring her to challenge him, to at least demand his gunblade. However he argued it to himself, he felt uneasy to face no resistance. But the girl didn't say anything; she just looked up at him with wide golden eyes. So he nodded at her and walked deeper into the recesses of the red-paneled entry tunnel under a ceiling painted in gold stars.

It opened up onto a vast hall.

A placard said that this was the Hall of Natural Values. Curious bones were arranged on wires, as far as the eye could see. Next to these, stuffed and painted displays conveyed what the bones might resemble if there had been flesh on them. There was a blue and white display with fins and jagged, mighty teeth - for many years a creature of myth alone, the SHARK was proven to exist by our honored City Father Creon Lightspurner, who uncovered these fine specimens in 3521 in a passage outside Io's Lake, and donated them to the museum in 3546. We have little concrete information on their mysterious way of life. SHARKS always moved forward; popular culture states that the sorceress Hulga cursed them all in their youth and henceforth none were capable of moving backwards. SHARKS are said to have enjoyed feats of daring, but despised tests.

Then came DOGS. Countless tales suggest that DOGS were powerful, loyal, and determined, but could be tricked very easily, making them the lowest of the valuable creatures. Some, the placards theorized, remained on the surface to this day, but presumably not for long. Then COYOTES. COYOTES were hunted to extinction by the surface-dwelling Blue Dragons in 945. These COYOTE bones were recovered by the glorious adventurer and City Mother Ithaka Lightspurner in 2756, and donated to the museum by her heirs in 3055. Little is known of COYOTES, except that they were not very clever or they would have gone underground and survived. They probably feasted on a combination of meat and earth. They are said to have disliked small girls and riddles.

Then the only surviving ALPACA bones in the world, donated by the esteemed City Prefect Golgorath Lightspurner. Lore informs us that ALPACAS never once betrayed a friend. Then came FROGS. FROGS represent clarity of thought, and were said to meditate very frequently. LIONS, of great interest to Squall, were near the back, but Seifer had no interest in lions, and so they never learned what values desiccated lion bones might represent.

They passed into the Hall of Unnatural Values. RUBY DRAGONS, who are poor sportsmen. BEHEMOTHS, creatures with filthy nails and bad habits. Then a hall hung with tapestries, where fountains tinkled merrily in the center, and a circle of headless statues had their hands outstretched in a childish Ring-A-Rosy (Our Values Of Art, Rhythm, and The Blind Cycle).

Hall upon hall – some with ceilings so high they seemed to vanish from sight, some a maze of delicate vases on pedestals, others nothing more than small and cramped hallways of dioramas and mannequins posed to look like Ancient Centrans and Trabians, and still others full of costumes hung up and lit to show every single stitch and stray thread. There was one room that was just a cave, and growing from its walls were flowers and trees. The light of a curious burning gemstone in the ceiling, a makeshift sun, made this possible. This was the Hall of Values Discarded. From there Seifer passed down winding steps bordered by shrunken heads, to a room where the floor was glass and delicate eyeless purple fish swam below them, to a wide hall of stuffed moon monsters of a kind he'd never seen before, posed on the surface of a false moon – the Hall of Bad Memories Yet To Be.

Then a Hall of Memories of Dubious Value. Numerous trinkets—trays, bowls, combs, typewriters: it would have made a terrific junk pile if it hadn't been arrayed on pedestals. One was a chipped vase. It showed a tall woman standing on a cliff face, holding a dead girl over the edge. Seifer recognized it as the knight Jana Ki, at the moment she'd rejected the magic of the Sorceress Sorrel. The next room was full of teeth. Murals made of teeth. Seifer's mind told Squall that teeth were linked to the knight Daemon Carteret, the great monster killer, who took a tooth trophy from every kill, then passed them on to his lovers. Then came a room made of spun colored glass with strange pink glass formations hanging down like stalactites and blue glass formations poking up like stalagmites, and in the center a pair of twin spears, which Seifer knew instinctively must have belonged to the Hillfins brothers.

He wanted to see it all more closely, but he pushed this desire down. He'd explore after he found the Gallery and discovered the strange secret there, whatever it was his guardian had sent him to retrieve.

His single-mindedness came as no surprise to Squall. Seifer could be deeply inflexible; he might suddenly veer off course and decide to do something no one had planned for, but once decided, there was little to turn him away from his chosen path. This blend of stubbornness and unpredictability was precisely why he'd made such a singularly poor SeeD candidate.

But of course Squall still wasn't seeing all of Seifer. He caught the surface things, the fore-brain. Words on placards that Seifer had to concentrate very hard to translate, his deliberate reminders that he had a goal, his muffled cursing at the fact that this appeared to be the one museum in the world without a directory. But in his back-brain, in a certain buried part of him, Seifer was feeling something else entirely. Wonder. He chased that down and kept it there, sunk deep, where not even the most powerful brain parasite might see it. But it was there. He recognized, after all, in each new gallery, old signs and sigils from books, the marks of certain Knights. He saw what might be the diadem of Ariella Laskey herself, a pair of claws like the ones wielded by Ignotus Romulus, a collection of scalps that might have been the work of Iseult Neve.

Seifer, so uncaring of his fellow man, was taking great care here. He wasn't letting on even to himself that he was, but he looked at it all hungrily, furtively as he went by, secretly wishing he could stop and pay it proper reverence. He'd had reverence for very little in his life, but he'd always wanted to have it; it had always seemed like a noble and Knightly thing to have.

And in the museum he found more Knightly things, signs that he was on the right path. It almost hurt to pass by the faded Timber-blue uniform of Vasko Phipps, a lock of bright hair that might have been Batibat Kerr's. He hadn't found the Knights yet, not quite. But here were all the pieces of them, pieces of Seifer's dreams. Things he'd never thought he might see, glorious bones and scraps of parchment, history and nobility, so much that he'd read about and idolized, but never assumed could just sit in front of him after no work at all, under dim museum light, glinting with the promise of goals fulfilled, worth attained.

Anyway. It would have been undisciplined and pathetic to stop. And gawk. Like he was a dumb kid, like he was Zell Dincht. So on he went. He went past rooms carpeted in fungi, with marble-lined basins cleverly disguised as forest pools, and rooms with heavy stone paneling that resembled wood until he touched it and found it cool and hard and false, and rooms with eyeless portraits, and rooms where the walls were painted with curious eyes.

He almost stumbled into the Gallery when he found it. He was so focused on never wavering from his chosen path that he turned the corner, vaguely processed the fact that the walls had given way to a wide and formless space, and tripped on a slight decline in the floor.

_Smooth_, Squall thought, with teenage smugness. Seifer neatly rescued himself from falling flat on his face, and then thought almost the exact same thought, as though it were some other Seifer Almasy that had nearly tripped. Then Seifer looked up. And Squall saw what he did. And they were both, for a moment, stunned, unable to think at all.

The Gallery was at a crossroads, a point where several smaller rooms opened up onto a great, open circle, with a ceiling so high up that it was only visible as a kind of skylight, a pinprick of jeweled light far off in the distance. Above the entry Seifer had passed through, there were words in that same curious language – Seifer, in his eagerness, processed only a few of them: OBEDIENCE TO THE CITY and THE PATRONS OF HYNE'S PEOPLE and HERE STAND THE KNIGHTS. For in the center, arrayed strangely, some seated around a table, some crouched over in the corner, some standing, some on haphazard thrones, like a living modern art display, were the Knights.

_…they're stuffed_, Squall thought, with no small amount of condescension. _Or just dolls or something. They have to be. Seifer, you moron. You found a—a wax army. And they're not going to help you. Now come home._

But Seifer couldn't hear him, and if he had, he wouldn't have cared. He stepped up to the dais. There was a shimmering light around it, like the kind of barriers Ultimecia had been able to cast while possessing Edea, all flash and magic with little point but to dazzle and dismay. He told himself he wouldn't be put off by a little thing like this, and shoved a hand through, half-fearful it would be burnt off. It wasn't. It had no effect whatsoever; it just made the clear brightness take on a haze of warning pink. Seifer ignored that, too. He stepped through. He felt nothing as he passed, though he left a pink impression on the barrier, a kind of preserved angry shadow.

Kazamai, called the Sprite, the Scourge of the Plains, stood in front of him. He knew it was her. That she might be wax didn't occur to him; that the woman who'd lain down her life for her sorceress might be anything other than completely real was an absurd thought. And touching her still cheek confirmed it: she was flesh and blood. She was tall and heavy-boned and her long-lashed black eyes were distant, unfocused. But she was real. Her chest rose and fell. Her skin was warm. Her hair was glossy and dark, her cheekbones prominent, like Raijin's. It seemed suddenly very brazen to touch her. Seifer wasn't a coward and touched where he pleased, but there were some lines he wouldn't cross, and especially not after having proven himself something of a monster, so he dropped his hand.

He was at a loss for what to do. She wasn't moving.

_Say something!_ Squall said.

Seifer reasoned that he should say something.

"Hello?" he said.

No response. That had been stupid.

_This whole thing is stupid, but yeah. That was dumb. She's obviously been put under a spell_, Squall said.

And Seifer realized it at the same time. Kazamai – he'd never called her anything but that; her defeat of three Nah Warlords in deadly trial was the stuff of legends, and he had always felt close to her, as though she were a stand-in for a mentor he'd never had – was alive. Breathing. Her skin was a blooming red-brown, the color of perfect health; her clear eyes were unblinking, but oddly wet and vulnerable and human, not the glass bead eyes of a wax figure or stuffed thing. But she wasn't moving. He held a hand just in front of her parted lips and felt the slow and steady pattern of her exhalations. He looked her over, passed a hand an inch before her clothes, which were a strange mix of old and new, a rotting chemise underneath a robe like the ones people wore down here, afraid to actually touch her, violate her like that, but desperate to know what kept her in this condition.

And she wasn't the only one.

Caliban Bajo wasn't hard to pick out. His story was one of the grimmest; at ten, his kingdom, the last Centran outpost in the world, had been raided by the old Estharians, who'd crept in bearing gifts only to turn around and raze the last Centran castle to the ground. As the former prince, he'd been tortured, the skin on his face peeled off to mark a new chapter in his life as a defeated slave. Ten-year-old Seifer had hated even turning the page in the Knights' Primer Cid had given him, hated coming to that particular chapter. It had seemed too dark, too grim.

"In every good story, you can find promise in the darkness," Cid had told him, when he'd confessed to this. "But you have to see it through to the end to discover it."

And by eleven he'd been able to. He was finally able to turn past the stomach-churning descriptions of torture, the rape of Caliban's sister, the butchery of his younger brothers, to reach the point when Caliban took revenge by loosing the Lunar Cry on Esthar. These events were burned onto his mind as though they'd happened to him. He'd forgotten that Cid had given him the book, had encouraged him to read it, until Ultimecia had snapped that into focus for him. But the story – the pitiful, angry child, with his face raw and hideous, desperate for revenge and recognition – had remained a part of him always. So he couldn't have failed to find Caliban seated calmly on the floor few feet away with his small hands folded in his lap, his childish face mutilated just as the stories had always said it would be.

Seifer carefully picked up his wrist and felt a pulse.

_Weird_, Squall thought, with a sinking feeling. _This is weird. Someone's put a spell on them, like Ultimecia did to you. Get out of there!_

Seifer couldn't hear him. The force that had pulled him out of Time Compression had sent him here, to meet the people who populated his dreams, and he would figure out what had happened to them if it killed him. He felt he owed it to them. Even if they should have been long-dead, and it was strange to find them all so still and calm and breathing.

It was even stranger to feel a pulse when he reached Ignotus Romulus, who ought to have been burned alive. In keeping with this Knight's terrible end, his entire body was blackened and scarred, as hideous as Caliban's face. At points the skin gave way to bone, and the his left knee joint was gone. Only some strange sorcery kept him intact and kneeling, bent over as though someone had positioned him to appear especially, gruesomely chivalrous. His charred chest rose and fell, and the awful gape where his eyes had been burnt out of their sockets even blinked one droopy, destroyed lid. Like he could sense that Seifer was nearby. It sent a chill through Seifer but he shoved that away, called Romulus's name. And received no response. Whatever strange coma had taken hold of the others had Romulus as well.

There were a few Knights Seifer didn't know. This came as a shock. He was probably the most learned person in the world on the topic of Knights, or at least the most obsessive. And so when he couldn't place a girl crouched on the floor, a pair leaning on each other near the end of the dais, an older man with one hand and a scarred knot on his bare chest, it was almost as unsettling as seeing Romulus blink had been.

And there were a few knights that were missing. This was of greater concern. In his Time Compressed haze, Iseult Neve had been here, right here. But now she seemed to have evaporated. She was another one he would have known at a glance, but she wasn't present, and this disturbed him far more than the signs of magic did. Jana Ki, too, was gone, and so were the Hillfins. Daemon Carteret, in shining Dolletian armor, with his underclothes rotted away underneath, by the looks of him, was standing near the center of the dais, ensorcelled as the rest. But where was Vasko Phipps? And Kerr? Kerr had been missing in Time Compression too, hadn't she?

Had that been some kind of clue? Meant to show him that the Knights were here subject to the whims of someone else, someone who was removing them for unknown purposes?

This was a horrible thought. These were heroes. But here they were propped up like a living exhibit, used for Hyne only knew what.

_Why do you care what they're used for? You don't even know what they are,_ Squall tried to remind him. _They should be dead. Are they zombies? Revenants? Some kind of trap for stupid former lapdogs?_

But these questions would have hardly signified even if Seifer had been able to hear them. He hadn't known what he would find here, not really. He'd assumed that a place here – the empty place, the one his mysterious rescuer had pointed out to him – was his, and that he was meant to stumble on it, and then possibly his sins would be erased, or maybe not anything so easy, but what did that matter? He'd find _something_. Some purpose, some way to regain his life and regain control and be more than a fool who'd led himself astray, betrayed the only place he'd ever lived in. Some way to be more than a lapdog who'd lost everything. More than Almasy, failed Knight, yesterday's villain, unpardonable and defeated and valueless.

Well, no one was going to pardon his sins. But neither could these people – brutal, barbaric, the dream-family he'd claimed for himself – castigate him for them. They'd done worse, many of them. And anyway they were silent. Someone had made them silent. And stuck them here for a purpose, and removed a few, it looked like, and for what? That was the question. That was the mission he now set himself. He had to uncover what was going on here, had to free the Knights from their strange sleep.

He resolved to go back and look for clues among the other rooms. So much was laid out before him, so many relics, the record of these lives. It might help him understand why they'd been settled here, some snatched from the jaws of death, and purely to be put on display. It seemed very sick to him that they were put on display.

He turned to go. Then he remembered the empty place in the far corner. The one that ought to have gone to a good man, a worthy Knight, but that had been polluted, when that Knight – he, Seifer Almasy – had proven himself nothing more than a hungry monster.

He felt suddenly, very keenly, the full weight of his actions. Shame and regret were things he always pushed down, always savagely ignored. Now they crested and blinded him momentarily. He put a hand to Carteret's armor to steady himself. These Knights were under a spell, but they were whole. They stood tall. He, by contrast, understood suddenly that he had been unraveling this whole time, like he'd felt himself do during Time Compression. Unraveling in Fisherman's Horizon and Deling City and Timber, searching desperately for records of a Gallery. Unraveling when he hit on the idea that the pathway down here was at the Centra Ruins—

_What_? said Squall. _Not the second sinkhole?_

-unraveling when he dragged Fujin and Raijin into another mess, and got them all arrested, and now left them behind to be rescued by Renata.

_Seriously: what?_ thought Squall.

But it was alright now, Seifer told himself firmly. Because he'd had to do it, or he wouldn't have found this place, and this self-appointed purpose. No. Not self-appointed. His mysterious rescuer had set him on this path, and no one had ever bothered to rescue Seifer before, not really. Not Cid and Edea with their poisonous gifts, not even Fujin and Raijin. He'd always had to rescue himself, until Time Compression, and now he owed it to that strange being – his guardian - to pay back the kindness they'd done him. To solve the mystery of the Knights' Gallery.

But first he'd look for his place. There had to have been a reason for showing it to him, after all. Maybe it was the first clue. He walked past Hrithik Blackeyes, Etalpalli Sim, Tenoch Yahuitl, checking to make sure each was just the same as the others, nothing unusually awake that could point to a solution (they were, and there was nothing). Then he reached the corner he'd seen in Time Compression, the one that should have hosted an empty seat, a plainly open spot. His spot.

Only not.

The spot was taken. It took Seifer a moment to process this. Squall, less invested in the proceedings, was quicker to respond.

_Who the hell is this?_

Squall needed to ask that question. He'd never been particularly interested in Knights. They were fairy tales and half-baked history and Squall had never been into that. Instead he'd cultivated a minor interest in ancient felines, but quickly forgotten about most of it by junctioning, then turned his mind dutifully to Garden topics and general ennui and just a touch of undiagnosed extreme depression. So he'd never bothered to uncover these stories, these names; he knew who they were only because Seifer knew. Seifer had within him a perfect glossary of every Knight ever written about.

"Wardegrave…?" Seifer said.

No. That was. That was idiotic. How could he really know it was Wardegrave? Wardegrave was the first. Over a thousand years had passed since he'd lived. So probably the tales of his wicked, curved blade, his long red cloak, his symbol (the cross Seifer had long-ago expropriated for his own use), were just additions over the centuries, not true to the man at all.

But they were all there, down to the last detail.

Wardegrave looked surprisingly young. He had large sorrowful eyes, long dark hair, prominent cheekbones. His skin was washed out to a pallid tan by the Gallery's unearthly light. He looked nothing like anyone Seifer had ever seen before, but it was undeniably him; the colors and accouterments proved that. Wardegrave blinked, as Romulus had, but this time Seifer paid it no heed. He was stroking the red cloak – someone had mended it, like how Raijin had painstakingly mended Seifer's coat while waiting for him to come to after the war. Wardegrave hadn't been left to rot, not like some of the others. He was cared for. His fingernails were clean. He had epaulettes on his robe that spoke of modern tailoring, but his shield was old, of ancient design, and the cross on it gleamed like someone had scrubbed it very recently.

Touching him wouldn't be much of a violation. Wardegrave was a legend, from so long ago that morals hadn't even existed when he'd breathed his last breath. Well. His supposed last breath. Here he was, in Seifer's spot, alive. In a way.

Seifer felt more determined than ever to discover what was happening here. Wardegrave was, well, in a class of his own. If all the rest of his dream family were brothers and sisters to him, siblings sharing a common hunger, then Wardegrave was the father of this bizarre crew. He was the first person to stand, unflinching, before a sorceress, and protect her at the cost of his own life and sanity. He was the one who'd defined what a Knight was, a being of loyalty and power, an eternal bulwark against the incursions of a banal and deeply unmagical outer world.

Seifer had idolized him for a long, long time. Ever since he'd seen some amateur actor throw on period-inappropriate costume and pretend to be Wardegrave, slashing a ruby dragon to pieces in the name of his lady. Wardegrave was the one they told all the best stories about. Wardegrave was the apex.

Seifer touched Wardegrave's wrist, then his outstretched palm. He imagined that Wardegrave's blood was hotter than the others, more powerful, more alive. Wardegrave stared at him with perfect serenity. Then his fingers closed over Seifer's and he smiled.

His other hand went to Seifer's hair. He brought Seifer's head down to collide with the arm of the chair.

The world went black.

* * *

A/N: It's been like a year since I updated this, so of course now I've gone back and decided that I dislike the style of all the previous chapters! This is what I get for sitting on this fic for so long.


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